Sarah Michelle Gellar is the chef/manager of a 70-year-old restaurant that is failing because, she feels, she can't cook. While shopping for the day's menu, she buys a basket of crabs, though she knows no recipes for them, and meets retail magnate Dylan Baker. Who has decided to open a great restaurant in Bendel's. Thanks to a magic crab in the basket, she finds things going her way with hunky Sean Patrick Flanery, who thinks she's a witch.
Everyone is good looking and capable as a performer, but here we are confronted with a popular trope of the 1990s, that no one can manage a satisfactory love life without supernatural intervention. Considering Miss Gellar's sad-sack attitude and poor self image (she imagines she is not utterly gorgeous), I found the whole thing as annoying as a Hallmark Channel movie, particularly when her whining alternates with moments of culinary triumph and dancing. Some nice location shooting around Manhattan is welcome, but the clueless way restaurateurs shop for the freshest seafood at the Union Square market, instead of Fulton Street -- which is not in the least attractive, and you would have had to deal with the Mafia in those days -- layers on the nonsense.
Everyone is good looking and capable as a performer, but here we are confronted with a popular trope of the 1990s, that no one can manage a satisfactory love life without supernatural intervention. Considering Miss Gellar's sad-sack attitude and poor self image (she imagines she is not utterly gorgeous), I found the whole thing as annoying as a Hallmark Channel movie, particularly when her whining alternates with moments of culinary triumph and dancing. Some nice location shooting around Manhattan is welcome, but the clueless way restaurateurs shop for the freshest seafood at the Union Square market, instead of Fulton Street -- which is not in the least attractive, and you would have had to deal with the Mafia in those days -- layers on the nonsense.