Anthony Bourdain called Pixar's Ratatouille the best food movie ever made, and he’d know
The chef who spent a career calling out fake restaurant culture said the most honest film about a kitchen was the Pixar one about a rat. He’d worked on it, so he was grading his own homework, sort of.
A Bourdain quote about Ratatouille is going around again, and it’s the kind of thing that sounds too perfect to be real. A famously hard-to-impress chef declaring that the most accurate movie ever made about restaurant life is the animated Disney one about a rodent who wants to cook.
He really said it. More than once, actually, and he had a better vantage point on it than almost anyone.
What Bourdain actually said
The fullest version of the quote traces back to chef and author Michael Ruhlman‘s blog in the summer of 2007, weeks after Ratatouille hit theaters, with a longer take later surfacing from an email shared on Bourdain’s Reddit community.
“I think it’s quite simply the best food movie ever made,” he wrote. “The best restaurant movie ever made, the best chef movie.” What sold him was the small stuff: the faded burns on the cooks’ wrists, the way each line cook had a personal history, the care paid to the food itself.
The moment that got him was Anton Ego, the gaunt food critic, taking one bite of the title dish and falling straight back into a childhood memory. Bourdain said it “hit me like a punch in the chest.”
He came back to it in a 2011 Entertainment Weekly interview, too, framing it as a quiet indictment of his own industry’s portrayal on screen. It was a measure of how badly Hollywood had botched the restaurant movie, he said, that far and away the best one was about an animated rat.
Coming from him, that’s not a small thing
Here’s the context that gives the quote its weight.
Bourdain built a whole second career out of being the guy who called things fake. He was scathing about celebrity-chef culture, about food trends, about the polished lie most cooking shows sell. He spent Kitchen Confidential telling readers what actually happens behind the kitchen door. So when that guy points at a kids’ cartoon and says this is the one that got it right, down to the burn scars, it lands differently than a normal good review. He wasn’t easily charmed, and a movie about a rat charmed him.
He wasn’t just a fan, he worked on it
The detail that turns this from a nice quote into a real story: Bourdain had a hand in the thing.
He and legendary chef Thomas Keller consulted on Ratatouille during its development, which is why Bourdain’s name turns up in the credits. He was typically self-deprecating about it, calling his role a “minuscule contribution (if any)” and saying he was “hugely and disproportionately proud” of the thank-you he got for it. So part of what he was praising was accuracy he’d personally helped get right. Grading his own homework, a little, but the grade stuck.
The friendship it started
The movie also gave Bourdain an unlikely friend in Patton Oswalt, the comedian who voiced Remy the rat.
Oswalt has told the story on Watch What Happens Live, saying Bourdain reached out as a fan of the film and told him flatly that they got kitchens and chefs right, that it was “very, very accurate.” The two stayed close, and Bourdain even handed Oswalt and his late wife restaurant recommendations for their honeymoon in Paris. A cartoon rat introduced one of the world’s most famous chefs to the guy who played him.
If you want to test the theory yourself, Ratatouille is on Disney+, and Bourdain’s name really is buried in the acknowledgments if you let the credits roll. The man who trusted almost nothing about how the world talks about food trusted this, and he signed his name to it.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (theme park editor) and the Pirates and Princesses newsroom.
Hat Tips:
The Takeout (2025), verified for the quote’s origin on Michael Ruhlman’s 2007 blog, weeks after the film’s release
BroBible (June 2021), verified for the full text of the Bourdain quote surfaced via his Reddit community and the credits thank-you
Entertainment Weekly (2011), verified for Bourdain’s “far and away the best was about an animated rat” remarks
SlashFilm (2021), verified for Bourdain and Thomas Keller consulting on the film during development
Watch What Happens Live, via My Modern Met (2021), verified for Patton Oswalt confirming the friendship and the “very, very accurate” remark