Cooking with Stella (2009)

Cooking with Stella is a film written by siblings Deepa Mehta and Dilip Mehta. The film is a light comedy about a Canadian diplomat (played by Lisa Ray) and her husband (Don McKellar) living in New Delhi, and their cook, Stella (Seema Biswas). It also stars Shriya Saran. Despite the film being a comedy, writer-director Dilip Mehta describes it as being "very issue-driven... an iron fist in a velvet glove."

Plot Story
Stella Elizabeth Matthews has been a cook in the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi for 30 years. She is brilliant as a cook, and brilliant at creatively padding her salary - with a few pilfered items, some minor overcharging, and a special phone-order duty free business. A newly posted Canadian diplomatic couple Michael and Maya arrive with their baby and, after an initial jolt when she learns that Michael will be staying home as "diplomatic housewife" while Maya goes off to work, everything goes swimmingly for Stella. Michael was a chef in Ottawa and he is longing to learn authentic Indian cooking. Stella agrees to be his "cooking guru". But Stella's cozy domestic set-up implodes when Tannu, an honest nanny, joins the household, and threatens to expose Stella's deceptions. Eventually Stella wins Tannu's full cooperation (and then some!). This unlikely partnership embarks on a much grander, riskier scam, which seems to bring disaster. An unexpected kind of justice is found, but not until the guru-student relationship between Stella and Michael has been sorely tested. Michael has learned many important lessons from his teacher ...including glorious traditional South Indian cooking. And Stella? Well.... let's just say dreams sometimes come true in unexpected ways.

Principal Cast
Don McKellar as Michael Laffont
Seema Biswas as Stella Elizabeth Matthews
Lisa Ray as Maya Chopra
Vansh Bhardwaj as Anthony
Maury Chaykin as H.E. Mr. Durand
Annie Desjardins as Sandy
Mulchand Dedhia as Vegetable Seller
Jaspal Sharma as Sub-Inspector
Terry Banting as Security Officer
Praveen Kocher as Butcher
Naresh Gosain as Chicken Wallah
Umesh Srivastava as Priest
Deana Culp as American Embassy Official
Mahesh Gahlot as Lecherous Old Man
Ruth Norfolk as Dorothy Durand
Anurag Arora as Constable in Market
Ena Vohra as Helpful Woman