When senior New York restaurant partner Enrico (Frank Bongiorno) resists overtures from a couple of low-rent hoods to retire he gets a couple of bullets in the back.

Of course, that's America and you couldn't really see the Mafia muscling in a British eaterie in the same way.

After all, Antony Worrall Thompson, Keith Floyd or Gary Rhodes would never attract that sort of murderous attention. OK, maybe Gary Rhodes before he reined his hair in.

Eating out is now a serious business and no place more so than New York, where director Bob Giraldi has also run the massively popular Vong operation in the Big Apple and London.

Here he films this thoroughly engaging drama-thriller in his trendy Gigino restaurant in New York's achingly hip Tribeca area.

The infernal workings of a restaurant are a drama in their own right, but here he grafts on one major dramatic storyline with a few subplots for light relief.

Enrico's junior partner, Louis (Danny Aiello), wants the place continued along traditional trattatoria lines ("meatballs like ma momma used to make") but go-ahead son Udo wants things changed.

Udo (Edoardo Ballerini) enjoys making pillars of lobster dressed in champagne sauce and presenting them to vicious restaurant critic Jennifer Freely (Sandra Bernhard).

Meanwhile, his star sous-chef, Duncan (Kirk Acevedo), has a gambling problem and just to make things tricky is having an affair with the girl Udo is after.

As the evening wears on, affable suit Ken (John Corbett) kills time at the bar while artist/ waitress Marti (Summer Phoenix) is humiliated by imperious art critic Fitzgerald (Mark Margolis).

Into this rich mix is thrown the arrival of the two hoods who gunned down hapless Enrico... and they want, er, a slice of the action.

Filmed almost entirely in the pressure-cooker confines of the restaurant, this bubbles along nicely until everything boils over with unexpected results. A feast for the eye and ear.

Tim Evans