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I’m sure most evenings working in a popular restaurant are among everyday life’s closest equivalents of trying to survive inside a pressure cooker. Dinner Rush (2000), director Bob Giraldi’s fourth movie, mostly takes place over the course of a night where things feel predestined to explode.

Most of the action unfolds at an Italian restaurant in the Tribeca district. Its figurehead is a restaurateur-slash-bookmaker named Louis (Danny Aiello), who floats among the patrons like a specter. The source of its acclaim and dependably long wait times is Louis’ son Udo (Edoardo Ballerini), a gifted chef whose yen for experimentation constantly chafes against his father’s expectations of traditional Italian cuisine. (Glances at all the food, whether a familiar comfort dish or something high-concept, efficiently conjures the “don’t go into this movie hungry” cliché often thrown around in writing about works of what could be called gastro-cinema.) The two men serve as the nuclei of the restaurant’s dyad of chaotic worlds: the one in the kitchen, where things are so intense and cutthroat that Udo will at one point fire a cook for attempting to slice with a dull knife, and the one where the patrons call the shots with inconsistent politeness.

The superbly acted Dinner Rush unravels on a night where the guests are particularly hard to deal with. There’s Fitzgerald (Mark Margolis), a stuck-up art critic who crassly leverages his influence to make big demands; Carmen (Mike McGlone), a loan shark who, with increasing forcefulness and the support of a partner he’s brought, is pressuring Louis to become a partner for a restaurant that has never really had partners; and Jennifer (Sandra Bernhard), a mercurial food critic. The seemingly gratuitous presence of an ostensible Wall Street trader dining alone (John Corbett) only arouses suspicions and stress that he actually is not, in fact, who he says he is. A policeman and his wife will stop by for a meal just when things seem like they’re going to start bubbling over.

Back-of-house dramas are innumerable, too, though to list them all out would be tiresome. This is a movie that, to an almost contrived degree, wants things to be as complicated as possible so that we never have a moment where we can appreciate a respite — not even when the employee in charge of writing down reservations (Vivian Wu) uses a smoke break as an opportunity to kiss one of her handful of lovers-cum-coworkers. (Co-screenwriters Brian S. Kalata and Rick Shaughnessy seem to want to make — and succeed in making — us feel as on-edge as anyone employed at this restaurant is on this night where simply trying to survive feels like a test.) 

Not everyone will, in a literal sense. For a film with the presence of organized crime looming largely, it’s expected that all will climax in something bloody, the spillage foreshadowed by some intermittent power outages that suggest a restaurant trying not to succumb to the turmoil roiling inside it. It isn’t surprising that this family restaurant won’t survive this night. What is is that it’s managed to get this far in an entrepreneurial lifetime where the sort of chaos seen is very unlikely to be a one-off.