For John Rivera, Food Is a Way To Show Love – Just Don’t Get in His Bad Books

For many people, food – and, more specifically, the act of cooking a meal for someone – is the ultimate way to show love. “Apart from cut fruit, in Asian culture I think soup and broth are the best displays of love because of the labour that they entail,” says chef John Rivera.

But what happens when love turns to hate? And how do chefs take something that expresses affection and flip its use into something a bit more sinister?

Those are some of the questions Jay Roach’s new film The Roses playfully explores. The Meet the Parents and Bombshell director is back with a divorce comedy that’s a modern adaptation of Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses. The book also inspired Danny DeVito’s 1989 film of the same name starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.

The Roses has a whip-smart script by Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara, who has received Academy Award nominations for his screenplays for The Favourite and Poor Things. The cast is led by Academy Award winner Olivia Colman and two-time Oscar nominee Benedict Cumberbatch.

Colman and Cumberbatch play Ivy and Theo, a couple whose relationship dynamic changes when Ivy’s chef career starts to eclipse her husband’s architectural one. They quickly turn from lovers to enemies, wreaking havoc on each other. Ivy does so with the help of a divorce lawyer, played by the ever-charming Alison Janney, and by using cooking – her former love language – to taunt Theo and eventually drive him crazy.

Like Ivy and Theo, Rivera has “quite a bit” of experience dealing with nemeses. “I would say there are some adversaries [in my life],” he says. But what would the chef behind Hot-Listed Melbourne Filipino restaurant Askal and ice-cream company Kariton make for someone he was feuding with? The answer is remarkably similar to what he often cooks for loved ones: soup.

“When you have negative feelings towards somebody, I always think, ‘What does the atmosphere feel like?’” he says. “So that dish would be something savoury, but cold.”

For his loved ones, Rivera often makes nourishing Filipino bulalo, a beef shank soup with bone marrow and warm spices. “If I ever cook that for you, I love you,” he says. But for his enemies? “I would probably be making a cold, bitter vegetable soup. I have a love-hate relationship with radicchio – I’d be making a cold cream of radicchio soup.”

The leafy veg would, of course, be overcooked and under-seasoned. “It’s two polar opposites,” he says. “You can make a soup where you kind of show that I don’t give a shit, and then you have these Asian-style soups, where there’s so much tender loving care in them.”

If you’re in Rivera’s bad books, asking him for restaurant recommendations might be just as risky as going over to his house for dinner. He knows some killer spots in Melbourne, but cross him and he’d sooner recommend a spot for an “underwhelming” $38 cacio e pepe than share his CBD sandwich go-to or hangover cure.

And don’t think you’re safe if he gives you something either. It might just be buto ng pakwan, Filipino dry-roasted and salted watermelon seeds. You crack them open with your teeth to eat the kernels inside, discarding the hard outer layer. “The first handful that you eat, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is great.’ And then the second and third handful, you’re just like, ‘Man, my lips are so chapped and so sore from just constantly rubbing against salt’,” he says. “And you’re not even nourished because they’re literally the size of pumpkin seeds.”

Rivera’s food revenge ideas are genius because they’re stitch-ups disguised as generous and well-meaning gestures. After all, who wouldn’t want a meal cooked by him, a chef-approved restaurant recommendation or a salty Filipino snack?

And while he’s far too kind to ever act on these devious schemes, next time you dine at Askal, you might want to send your compliments to the chef just to be safe.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Searchlight Pictures. The Roses is showing only in cinemas from September 4. Watch the trailer here.