On this episode of Bad Dads Film Review, the team reviews Toscana (2022), Netflix’s Danish-Italian comfort drama about a stressed fine-dining chef who inherits his father’s restaurant in Tuscany and slowly rediscovers rustic cooking, unresolved family memories, and a wildly inconvenient romance.

In this episode

• The tragic walking football update: a playoff final lost on penalties, after Sidey chose love and anniversary plans over football
• Dan’s gardening-inspired Top 5 theme: plants in film and television
• The Day of the Triffids, Audrey II, Ents, Leon’s plant, Martian potatoes, Interstellar corn, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Batman’s blue flower, Cheech and Chong’s marijuana van, Tomacco, Swamp Thing, Groot, and Moriarty’s dead plants
• Reegs’ full crop of plant-film puns, including Chive Angry, Kill Dill, Mulch Ado About Nothing, Full Petal Jacket, and music by Sage Against the Machine
• Sidey’s essential full English breakfast rules: beans on the plate, fried bread as gold standard, black pudding welcome, hash browns firmly under suspicion
• Toscana’s dubbed-language confusion before Sidey realises the film is Danish, Italian and English
• Theo Dahl’s sterile Danish fine-dining kitchen, tweezer food, a lost €9m investor, and a full meltdown at the pass
• Cris calling out the fantasy of a top chef personally cleaning the kitchen
• Theo’s inheritance trip to Tuscany, his battle with rustic food, suspect ice cubes, and unexpectedly excellent olive oil
• Sophia, Pino, the wedding catering deal, and the film’s very convenient emotional geography
• The €500k/€900k sale gamble and Theo’s professional pride kicking in
• The romance problem: Sophia is engaged, Pino seems perfectly sound, and Theo spends much of the film behaving like a potato
• Theo rediscovering cooking “by feel” rather than by gram-perfect control
• The ending: sale completed, buy-back arranged, Danish chefs shipped to Tuscany, Sophia returns, and everyone apparently embraces rustic restaurant life

Bad Dads consensus

• Scenery: gorgeous
• Runtime: painless and breezy
• Plot: extremely predictable
• Food content: oddly less visible than expected
• Romance: not especially believable
• Pino: treated very harshly by the film
• Theo: hard to root for, despite the intended redemption arc
• Overall: watchable but thin — Dan and Cris found it easy to sit through, while Sidey wanted more charisma, chemistry and actual cooking

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