When the Critic Eats: The Taste of Humility in Ratatouille

There’s a line in Brad Bird’s Ratatouille that lingered with me long after the credits rolled, one uttered by the film’s most unyielding critic: “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” It moved me, striking my being so sharply as the film pivoted toward resolution. It’s one of those lines that feels powerful and definitive—at least, until I sat with it for a while. Within the world Ratatouille builds, the line landed like a revelation, but only because everything leading up to it had made it seem uncertain.

The film undergoes its resolution locked away in an ivory tower of cuisine, vastly different from its exposition. Remy (Patton Oswalt), though fated to become a “great artist,” is introduced among rats who steal meager scraps and run from broomsticks. They scurry right past the ingredients in favor of mere sustenance—rotten vegetables, pastry scraps, half-rancid meat. Unlike Remy, the rats give no thought to what they’re eating. They’re incapable of distinguishing between ingredients, uncertain of whether or not what they’re about to ingest will kill them. It’s there that Bird introduces one of the film’s core messages: eating does not imply tasting. 

Remy doesn’t just eat to survive—he tastes, he experiments, he imagines. His creation with a mushroom he finds, scraps of tommes de chèvre de pays cheese (which he so perceptively identifies), and rosemary, exemplifies this. Indeed, Remy’s idol, the late chef Gusteau, insists that “anyone can cook,” a phrase Remy clings to as gospel, and his dangerous voyages to an old woman’s kitchen seem to be his attempt to deliver on this. But, if Gusteau believes a cook’s only limit is their soul, what happens when the body one’s soul inhabits is disqualified from mattering? 

When Remy finally emerges from the countryside into the gleaming kitchens of Paris, he finds that Gusteau’s ideal has already been commodified. “Anyone can cook” is no longer a radical invitation—it’s a slogan plastered across cookbook covers and restaurant signs, a promise whose inclusiveness is only rhetorical. In the kitchen, hierarchy reigns. Creativity is confined to those deemed legitimate, and legitimacy is granted only to those who fit the mold. Remy’s greatest limitation, then, is the gaze that refuses to see him as capable of artistry at all. Not merely because he’s a rat, but because he isn’t already part of the mythos of Gusteau’s restaurant. Bird’s Paris is a world where art is endlessly celebrated, yet carefully gatekept—where the line between genius and impostor is drawn not by taste, but by status.

This is the contradiction Ratatouille holds in its center: a story that champions artistic freedom while revealing how tightly art is policed. The film asks whether greatness is the result of innate talent, cultivated mastery, or simply permission—whether genius can exist independently of the systems that validate it. Through Remy’s journey from scavenger to chef, Bird constructs a world that both yearns for openness and recoils from it, suggesting that the barriers to art are as much cultural as they are physical. Ultimately, Ratatouille invites us to ask whether art is an act of mastery or of openness—and whether, in a city defined by gatekeepers, humility might be the rarest form of genius. The question, then, is not whether “anyone can cook,” but who is allowed to prove it.

Even Remy isn’t immune to the elitism that accompanies Gusteau’s statement. When he first enters the restaurant, Remy sits near the glass roof, gazing into the kitchen—he marvels at its harmony. Everyone does their job perfectly: The saucier stirs a pot, 2 cooks absent-mindedly sauté scallops, and the sous chef keeps a watchful eye. But when he actually witnesses the essence of cooking, rapid-fire experimentation and the discovery of something new, he recoils in disgust. It’s the newly-hired trash boy, Linguini, doing the cooking—someone whom Remy deems to be “nobody,” and “not part of the kitchen.” He leaps onto the counter, tail twitching in fury, determined to fix what he sees as an unforgivable culinary crime. If “anyone can cook,” why does Remy so clearly believe Linguini cannot? Remy’s idea of “anyone” already excludes those who lack traditionally-defined taste or discipline. Notwithstanding his oddly-elevated senses of smell and taste, Remy’s knowledge of cooking and what’s good or bad comes from Gustau’s cookbooks. His taste isn’t his own, therefore, but an extension of an accepted scripture. 

There’s irony in this: Bird situates his rat protagonist as both believer and gatekeeper, one who loves the ideal of democratized art but cannot bear its imperfect manifestations. He’s someone who, as he tells his rat brothers, strives to think outside the box, but in reality, he’s only placing himself in one larger, subconsciously buying into cooking as something sacred. The moment Remy corrects Linguini’s mistake by the book, the film quietly upholds its central dissonance—belief in openness colliding with the elitism necessary to maintain artistic excellence. What Remy seeks isn’t equality of access but the standardization of potential among those with access—a crucial difference that haunts the rest of the film. 

At this moment, Remy’s mantra evolves into something a bit less optimistic. He knows he has the gift, an innate sensibility for taste and smell—what he sees as the makings of a “great artist.” But he has yet to accept that, as Anton Ego ultimately puts it, “a great artist can come from anywhere.” It’s funny that Linguini inevitably takes credit for Remy’s soup and that this happy accident elevates him to a respected position within the restaurant. Despite possessing no artistic talent whatsoever or even knowledge of his creation, Linguini is allowed through the restaurant world’s pearly gates. If Remy is to achieve his dream of being a cook, he has to borrow credibility from someone already within the sphere. 

Soon, Remy learns how to control Linguini’s actions by pulling on his hair. He controls Linguini’s every movement, allowing him to cook elaborate dishes with his new tool. What begins as a comic device becomes a metaphor for how institutions validate talent only when it conforms to preexisting hierarchies. In Gusteau’s kitchen, the human form is the price of admission. Remy’s cooking astonishes, but only when filtered through Linguini’s face and voice. Their collaboration dramatizes the paradox of invisible labor—the way creation often relies on someone else’s name to be legible. And yet, Bird refuses to turn this into tragedy. Instead, he plays with the absurdity of it: the rat puppeteering the man, the genius hidden in plain sight. It’s both utopian and cynical, as though the film can’t decide whether it’s celebrating the dissolution of barriers or mourning the fact that talent still requires disguise to be believed. The fact that Remy’s a rat is just a way of exaggerating this very-real idea. It’s these little contradictions that make me love Bird’s work.

A little tidbit here that stuck out to me was the fact that the restaurant staff initially celebrated Linguini’s actions. While the sous chef is berating Linguini for his carelessness, the other cooks defend him and tell the sous chef that firing him would be a grave mistake; worse, a blatant conflagration of Gusteau’s mantra that anyone can cook. It seems that they actually believe that anyone can cook; potentially even cook well, given the opportunity to experiment.

Enter the critic. At this point, Anton Ego shares the same distaste for Gusteau’s motto, one that Remy seems to tacitly agree with. He’s the literal manifestation of the Paris that associates the quality of cooking with the perception of genius. Under the guise of “respecting cooking,” he has turned art into something exclusive—what makes a dish “decent” is simply his power to deny it. In taking away a star from Gusteau’s restaurant he’s reinforcing the barrier between who matters and who doesn’t. In this way, he and Remy aren’t so different—each of them tends to confuse the discernment of the origin of food with superiority.

When Ego returns to the restaurant to pass judgment on Linguini’s (that is, Remy’s) cooking, the film reaches its quietest and most revealing moment. Gone is the orchestration of Remy’s debut, the chaos of the kitchen’s farce. The dish, a humble ratatouille, is so unassuming that it short-circuits Ego’s critical apparatus. His fork slips, the lens widens, and suddenly the taste bypasses intellect altogether. It’s not refinement that moves him, but memory—his mother’s kitchen, the smell of summer vegetables, the simplicity of being loved. What collapses in that instant isn’t Ego’s pride, but the entire scaffolding of aesthetic hierarchy. The gatekeeper forgets the gate. Bird doesn’t frame this as a conversion, but as a surrender: Ego’s authority dissolves not because he’s proven wrong, but because the film insists that the experience of art cannot always be so easily categorized. 

That night, he says that he does not remember the last time he asked for the waiter to give his compliments to the chef. And, when Remy reveals himself, Ego first thinks it’s a joke. Such fine cuisine could only come from an expected source: someone with a name for themself in the restaurant industry. But his smile soon vanishes as he receives a tour of the rat-staffed kitchen. 

The next day, his review appears, which says he enjoyed a meal from a “singularly unexpected source.” He adds, “To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core.” He finally understands what Chef Gusteau meant by “anyone can cook”—that while not everyone was created with equal talent, nobody should face disqualification from matters in the world of cuisine simply because of their origin. In this way, “a great artist can come from anywhere.” Ego’s review is, then, a redemption that concedes the failure of defining art through lineage and ethos. Instead, the world of cuisine can be appreciated in a vacuum, with the creations standing for themselves, shorn of didactic intent. Greatness as a critic relies less on gatekeeping and more on humility: the willingness to receive something unexpected and aid in the discovery and the defense of something new. As Ego puts it, “the world is often unkind to new talent.” 

True taste, alongside true genius, might begin where power ends.

William Green is a staff writer for Double Exposure. When not writing about film, you can find him swing dancing, practicing jazz piano, or indulging his caffeine addiction.