Carême, review: the story of the Napoleonic superstar chef is whipped into a sexy soufflé

Telegraph

30-04-2025

In Carême (Apple TV+), an eight-part drama set in the fine dining rooms and bustling kitchens of post-revolutionary France, Bridgerton gets into bed with Bake-Off. Sex and food make their joint entrance in the very opening shot, as a pretty young woman delicately licks a cream-tipped finger. Yes, she's sampling a recipe for icing, but she's soon the recipient of more intimate foreplay.
The finger belongs to Antonin Carême, Paris's fêted young pastry chef who is here exhumed from the pages of actual history. He's an extraordinary figure who, despite humble origins, was employed by Talleyrand, cooked for European royalty and codified haute cuisine. As embodied by Benjamin Voisin, he's now playfully repackaged as a touselled pin-up of the hot hob.
The script extracts the basics from Cooking for Kings, Ian Kelly's 2004 biography of Carême. Kelly, who adapted the book into a one-man play, is credited as co-author of the pilot, but there are signs of a right old food-fight in script meetings as a result of which facts have been tossed aside or massaged into a fantastical soufflé.
That Carême worked for Talleyrand (Jérémie Renier) is the drama's core ingredient. For the grandmaster of chicanery, he cooks up a storm to achieve political goals: please Bonaparte, sway the exiled Louis XVIII, send a coded message to a political prisoner. There's even a cooking compo which is essentially MasterChef in perruques.
As a barely glimpsed Napoleon gears up to be crowned emperor, the plot pouts and schemes through a maze of interpersonal twists and geopolitical turns. When not cooking, Carême uses his privileged access to grand houses to go snooping. His nemesis is a furniture-chewing chief of police (Micha Lescot), while he consorts with a sultry quartet of paramours and princesses – kitchen frenemy Agathe (Alice Da Luz), iffy girlfriend Henriette (Lyna Khoudri) and Mesdames Bonaparte and Talleyrand (Maud Wyler and Sigrid Bouaziz).
It's fun stuff, served with a saucy side order of rumps and humps. An orgiastic dinner in episode one, where everybody's going every which way with anybody, sets the tone, and there are flirtatious glimpses of sapphic subtext. But the true porn, filmed in lingering close-up, happens in the kitchen, where the vol-au-vent is succulently invented, and towering cakes drip with gold icing. The show's army of food designers are its ultimate stars.
It's handsome to look at and, being in French, to listen to. The script's insouciant disdain for accuracy has been fully embraced by the costume department, who dress Carême as a strutting New Romantic popsicle in cream donkey jacket, tartan troos and dandy earring. In the climactic episode he dons – supposedly invents – the classic all-white outfit topped with the tall hat, and coins the word 'chef'.
Carême's hedge-betting pitch to both foodies and French Revolution buffs feels like an on-trend commissioning strategy. Amazon Prime attempted something similar in My Lady Jane, which introduced magical creatures into Tudor dynastic politics. Where to next? A drama that appeals alike to fans of spycraft and antiques? Classical civilisation and home improvement? Vampires and gardening? We are all slaves to the algorithm now.