For nine months, without really knowing it, I lived on a movie set. Let me explain. Two floors below me, our former downstairs neighbors Zach Carter and Marky Hinojosa, turned their apartment—plus the elevator, lobby, stairwell, and roof—into the set for A Chef’s Tale: The Real Story of Duet, the feature-length film they wrote, directed, shot, edited, and starred in. Carter had mentioned this project to me once or twice, but I was completely ignorant of its scope or ambition—until I got an invite to the first big screening.

The movie premiered at the Big Apple Film Festival on May 13, at the Village East by Angelika. On September 26, “Chapter One” of the film will be presented as a short as part of the Austin Comedy Film Festival, followed by a screening of the full-length movie later that evening.

If you live in New York City, you get used to recognizing places you know in real life in film and television. It is different when it is your own home. Our building is seven stories tall with eight units, most of which have near-identical layouts. It was incredibly surreal to see what is essentially my own home on the big screen, down to the exact same kitchen cabinets, counters, and overhead lighting fixture.

In the movie, however, their apartment became home to one of the city’s hottest tables, the apartment restaurant Duet helmed by culinary wunderkind Cornelius Carter (played by Carter). The chef’s roommate, Charlotte Wittmann (also the real name of the actress, who is Hinojosa’s girlfriend and lived in the apartment as well), is his tireless sous chef.

The main character’s love for food is rooted in Carter’s Italian American upbringing, with his mom and grandma essentially playing themselves in the film. “My nonni used to make food for us every Sunday, and we’d always have soup and a pasta or a lasagna,” he told me. (The power of a family recipe becomes a major plot point, with nonni’s real-life stash of homemade jarred tomato sauce even making an appearance.)

In an amusing instance of art imitating real life, not long before the filming began, I actually hosted a real chef’s real restaurant in my own apartment. I met Karina Garcia and her husband Lalo Rodriguez in the park across from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital on Election Day in 2020, and she gave me the card for their restaurant, Cocina Consuelo. They came to our house and cooked me a spectacular birthday dinner in March 2022—and now they have a brick-and-mortar location that’s landed them on the New York Times top 100 list two years running.

So while we don’t actually have hungry diners lining up down the block hoping to score a table at the apartment like the fictional Duet, a very buzzy restaurant did exist here, if only for one night!

Doing It Themselves

The product of four years writing, nine months filming, and 18 months editing, A Chef’s Tale is a completely self-funded, micro-budget indie film. The total cost was perhaps $10,000, not including the year-and-a-half lease at $3,660 a month. Filming went up until move-out day, with the final scenes poignantly shot in an empty apartment.

The nearly 40-person cast is made up of the filmmakers’ friends and family, including some of Carter’s coworkers at Ellen’s Stardust Diner in Times Square, where he is a singing waiter. (Carter put his share of the Ellen’s tip bucket toward production costs.)

The apartment’s fourth roommate, Carter’s now-fiancé James Carter, contributed by cooking all the onscreen food, such as the gourmet meals chef Carter made with forgotten unlabeled canned goods (“the dusties”) from his first New York City job at a Harlem soup kitchen.

“When we all moved in, we were always gawking at what James was making,” Carter said. Asking him to cook for the production came naturally—and with the added bonus that they could all eat the delicious dishes once the camera stopped rolling. (A meal, plus transportation costs, was the only compensation the filmmakers could offer their cast. )

Besides the apartment, shooting locations included Whittman’s family’s home in Peekskill; backyards in Ithaca, where James works as a Cornell professor; and Connecticut, in Carter’s dad’s RV and the basement of his nonni’s home.

The movie is shot entirely on the iPhone 13 ProMax and 14 ProMax, with Carter and Hinojosa’s personal phones serving double duty as production cameras after it became too difficult to schedule use of professional equipment.

“We had a collaborator who I worked on a short film with before, and he had gotten a new camera and all that stuff, but our timelines weren’t working out,” Carter said. “We realized that if we wanted to get it done, we had to make it ourselves.”

A Partnership Over a Decade in the Making

“We just wanted to write what we had at our disposal,” Hinojosa told me. Setting the story inside their home just made sense.

The script evolved when they moved into our shared apartment building in the fall of 2022, with the plot taking advantage of the open concept kitchen and living room, with an elevator that opens up directly into the unit.

The pandemic had delayed the project, but also gave the filmmakers a better understanding about the blurring of professional and personal boundaries when one is working from home, and how that might create conflicts for their characters. And all the media Carter and Hinojosa consumed during lockdown sparked ideas for outlandish new directions that the plot might take.

Their original idea for a short was meant to evoke the over-the-top reverence of Chef’s Table—a simple mockumentary. But that’s just the first act of the final film, which evolves into a true-crime mystery story in the spirit of the comedy series American Vandal, before reaching its climax as a found-footage horror film à la The Blair Witch Project.

This unique three-part structure was inspired by WandaVision, the 2021 miniseries based on Marvel Comics.

“Every episode was a different genre or a different era of television,” Carter said.

“It blew a lot of people’s minds at the time, and that just allowed us to go further into our story and see how we could play with genre,” Hinojosa added.

It also essentially broke down the film into three more manageable segments—akin to producing three episodes, instead of the more daunting task of a full-length film. The unexpected narrative shifts keep the viewer on their toes—and are frankly delightful, if increasingly ridiculous.

An Unconventional Production—and Finished Product

Filming A Chef’s Tale at home meant there was no need to get permits or permission. The only risk, really, was bothering the neighbors. Carter and Hinojosa had a few awkward interruptions filming in the elevators, but for the most part, things went smoothly and the neighbors stayed happy. (As I mentioned, I remained almost entirely ignorant of the cinematic drama unfolding right under my nose.)

“It was good energy,” Hinojosa said.

Post-production, on the other hand, presented a new set of challenges, with the filmmakers having to teach themselves Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop. They split up tasks, watched lots of YouTube tutorials, and went through endless rounds of trial and error to edit down the footage and create their own special effects, chyrons, and other graphics.

They held one screening of the finished film for friends and families, and donations from the audience went toward festival submission fees. Enter Big Apple Film Festival.

My viewing experience at the premiere was undeniably enhanced by the celebratory atmosphere at the screening, where the filmmakers’ friends and loved ones cheered each time a new cast member appeared. The audience was electric. But I was genuinely impressed with the film Carter and Hinojosa managed to cook up.

The movie is a decidedly zany comedy. It opens with chef Carter rapturously smelling the produce not at the farmer’s market, but at the humble veggie stand outside our local subway station, where produce is definitely sourced wholesale, not at local organic farms. At one point, chef Carter’s uncontainable passion for cooking even explodes into an over-the-top moment of interpretative dance.

A Chef’s Tale is a wild journey of both culinary and personal discovery, and a testament to the hard work and determination of its cast and crew—who managed to pull this all off without disturbing neighbors like me, working from home just a few feet away.

I asked Carter and Hinojosa how they had the confidence to take on a project of this scale with so few resources.

“There were definitely moments that maybe intimidation came in,” Hinojosa admitted. But in the end, they believed in the story they had written and their ability to translate it to film: “We were just two people, and we had the time on our hands.”

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