Did not find a page for this when I watched the movie a few months back. By now, this has come and gone, and has not made much money, since the blockbuster-watching crowd has their plates full, and their palate ruined. That's not to say this one's a masterpiece, but it's deffo much better than all the fried food out there in the form of celebrity watch in all those mainstream flicks.
Most detractors would say that the focus should have been on the kitchen, and on the protagonists' love for hole-in-the-wall locations to find their delicacies. And I'd agree, while also hoping that more attention was paid to those places, along with making it a meal of most of the leads' conversations on food, and experimenting with recipes - that was the same thing on my mind when I watched the original with Lal and Shwetha Menon. Sadly, other than Ilaiyaraja's score and an improvement on all the technical values from the original, the threads I wanted expanded have not got their due.
I do have to say that, over the past couple of years, my opinion has changed on that. If a movie is about real people, why not make it about their lives, in which many things keep going on at once, and not just 1 theme (which is what each movie with a lazy screenplay focuses on). Therefore, while I revise my opinion on the original, I also appreciate the remake's guts in sticking to all the side/sub- plots that were risky in the first place, and sticking to them, though none of them have any kind of payoff in the commercial milieu.
This one, boldly (yet disappointingly), treads the same path as the original, keeping its (few) strengths in place, other than Menon herself, and retaining its weakness as well, even in the characterization and performances of the supporting leads. The supporting cast, however, is decent.
Where this one scores over the original, though, is in the technical aspects, most notably (go ahead, guess away) the (Red) cinematography, making all the delicacies come alive, and if the focus was on that over the rest of the movie, all of us in the audience would have been in the throes of multiple foodgasms. However, Prakash Raj goes the PG13 route on that and shifts focus to the protagonists loneliness instead. Ideally, I should've singled out the fantastic foreground score by Ilaiyaraja, but I did notice the quality of the soundtrack deteriorate with each track. However the first two tracks, esp. the one rendered by Kailash Kher during the titles, stand out for their melody, as well as picturization.
The bigger question that this story (none too subtly) asks is if all oldies who're lonely are foodies, just 'cause they're not getting' any. Or is it just one of those things, like, are they lonely because they're foodies, and do not appreciate the other 'finer' things in life?
This movie does not bog one down with all those questions, though, going for the predictable and mundane on those aspects.
All in all, worth watching once at the multiplex, and do not miss the beginning (that title melody and its rendition/picturization is worth the price of admission alone).