 Besides 20 minutes of delicious food porn, Tortilla Soup is just sugary meringue, its story of a widower Mexican-American patriarch and his three daughters, standard soap opera. There's nothing new to it: The father, an experienced cook, hasn't married again after his wife's death, and his three grown daughters still live with him. The older one, having given up hope of ever finding a husband, has turned into a born-again spinster; the middle one struggles to start a life of her own, having her father's knack for cooking, but instead working on business following his advice; the youngest one, the teenage daughter, is trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life, finding his father's values old-fashioned for the US of A. And of course, by the end of the movie, all these personal dillemas are solved in ways we've probably seen a lot of times before in other movies and other stories; hugs are given, lessons about family and love are learned. Ho-hum.
Still, what makes this movie tasty (pardon the pun) is all the cooking sequences. This is truly food porn because it is not a cooking lesson, neither a cavalcade of people eating food. No, I call it porn for the mouth-watering reaction from watching all this food getting prepared —all the ingredients being cooked, all the vegetables being sliced and diced, the plantains and the pork meat being fried—: it creates a true sense of hunger for all that good food.
Make that Mexican food; boy, the pictures of squash flower soup and roasted nopales (cactus pads) had me drooling really bad for a long time.
 ["Tortilla Soup" does a] pale recycling of "Eat Drink Man Woman," Ang Lee's domestic food fight of a movie, in which the menus served a crafty purpose: the growling of the audience's stomach drowned out some of the perfunctory conflicts in the storytelling.
...[The actors] are missing something, besides a script. Even if you haven't seen "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Tortilla Soup" is still as predictable as a fast-food restaurant...
At the very least [the movie] is this year's leading candidate for foodie classic, the type of picture that sends audiences scurrying for a meal after the credits roll. The Mexican food is credited to Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger of the wonderful Border Grill in Santa Monica, Calif., with the lovely creations attributed to the on-set chef, Monique King. The feasts will produce an unfortunate side effect for New Yorkers — envy — since what usually passes for Southwestern food in Manhattan would be called airline grub in the rest of the country.
— Elvis Mitchell, A Family Feasts and Stays Slim
{Edited on May 9, 2003. Changed "working business" for "working on business", "What really makes this movie tasty" for "Still, what makes this movie tasty" and "reaction that watching" for "reaction from watching".}
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