Inventive, engaging modern light comedy borrowing heavily from Western tropes.

A good and funny story about love and family. The father/chef character is absolutely terrific, he steals every scene he's in. Food and dining are quite cleverly used as a device to tell the stories of the various characters. This is a good early film from Ang Lee.

Such a visual feast! The storyline gently evolves around feelings and food, unravelling subtle connections.

A family epic on a small scale. Heart-warming, moving, truly beautiful work. I laughed, I cried, I drooled over the amazing-looking dishes being served. Perfectly charming.

Another great food movie (like Tampopo or Babette's Feast). This one looks at food and family.

With some superficiality on the foreground Lee in Taiwan still has pure cinematic experience to offer. Food is sexy, oh yeah. With architectured shots, direction of photography and use of filters food really seems to bind a man and his daughters together.

Nice little slice of Taiwanese life.

Gentle comedy of food and family life, reasserting primary needs over more ephemeral desires.

Full of surprises and delightful scenes of cooking. I enjoyed Master Chu so much.

Lee's third feature and his last Taiwanese film before making the unlikely jump to Sense and Sensibility and Hollywood gigs as steadily as he desired. The script is the usual smart, sad concoction wrought with the tender realities of human emotion that stand as the hallmark of Lee's collaborations with James Schamus (Hui-Ling Wang, co-writer of Lee's foreign language films that followed is also credited here). Yet the whole film, while inviting with its quiet charms, feels a little pedestrian.