Review: Heartwarming and appetite-whetting Canadian documentary Born Hungry traces a journey worth a thousand meals | Canada Voices

• Born Hungry
• Directed by Barry Avrich
• Classification N/A; 77 minutes
• Opens in select theatres Oct. 18; streaming on Crave starting Oct. 21

Critic’s Pick

At one moment late in the tender new Canadian documentary Born Hungry, it seems as if the film’s star subject, acclaimed Toronto chef Sash Simpson, might be on the verge of a life-altering breakthrough.

While visiting Chennai, on the Bay of Bengal in eastern India, Simpson listens patiently to a local police official as he goes over the realistic chances of finding the family members whom he was separated from at a young age – a fuzzily remembered schism that left the boy to spend his earliest years begging for food on the streets. Yet what happens next, a moment which shouldn’t be spoiled, underlines just how our personal histories do not, and often cannot, fit into neat narrative formulas. Sometimes real life is incredibly messy. Beautiful, but messy.

As the chef behind his eponymous Toronto restaurant, this is a reality that Simpson knows all too well. What are kitchens, after all, other than places to turn the scraps of our natural world into something magnificent? But it is particularly effective to see that universal truth unfold over the course of director Barry Avrich’s swift and effective new documentary, which could be easily marketed as the Dev Patel orphan drama Lion meets the appetite-whetting gastro-tourism of, say, Jiro Dreams of Sushi. In fact, there’s enough drama in Born Hungry to also merit a callback to something like the family antics of This Is Us.

The film opens with Simpson dishing up haute cuisine in the tony Toronto neighbourhood of Summerhill, where scallops are seared to perfection and haute hamburgers layered with the finest of condiments. One of the country’s top culinary minds, Simpson earned his kitchen-confidential stripes serving in Mark McEwan’s legendary North 44 restaurant before branching out on his own – a journey that involved navigating the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the pandemic. Yet that fine-dining struggle was nothing compared to Simpson’s upbringing.

As a runaway child struggling to survive on the streets of Chennai, Simpson was very close to starvation when he was welcomed, during a chance encounter, into a local orphanage. And it was only by a further stroke of luck that Simpson was then spotted by famed Canadian child-rights advocate Sandra Simpson, who ended up adopting dozens of children from around the world and bringing them to her loving, and crowded, home. Once settled in midtown Toronto, Simpson became a member of the family, and patiently developed into the kitchen all-star who he is today.

Yet throughout all his of his life in Canada – including building a family with wife Robin Pitcher – Simpson could never shake the feeling that he left something behind in India. Which is when Avrich’s doc goes deeper into the chef’s emotionally taxing journey home to uncover the mystery of his childhood.

Already an expert at profiling the lives of Canada’s most famous faces – including Oscar Peterson, David Foster and Rosalie Abella, to name a few – Avrich seizes the opportunity to dive deep into the personal history of a lesser-known figure whose life is just as complex and rewarding. And Simpson, who balances a natural kind of warmth with the pensive mood of a man who knows his heart isn’t quite full, is a charming screen presence.

You will leave the film as hungry for Simpson’s food as you will be full from his emotional journey.