103 minutes – Comedy
Language: English, Hindi,
Festival release date: September 16, 2009 – Toronto International Film Festival
Release date: March 26, 2010
Canadian Distributor: Mongrel Media

Stella Elizabeth Matthews (Seema Biswas) 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 diplomat (Lisa Ray) and her husband Michael (Don McKellar) arrive with their baby (Alexiane Perreault). After an initial jolt when Stella 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 (Shriya Saran), 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.

Director Dilip Mehta talks about The Making of Cooking With Stella.
Watch Don McKellar talk about his work in Cooking With Stella.