Filmmaker Liz Lachman hadn’t planned on directing a documentary. But in 2009, when her wife, Food Network star and restaurateur Susan Feniger, was in the process of conceiving and opening her first solo effort, Hollywood restaurant Street, Lachman grabbed her camera and started shooting the process. The result, “Susan Feniger: Forked,” offers an intimate portrait of how there’s more to a restaurant’s success than popularity and stellar reviews. The film will have its West Coast debut on Oct. 17 at the Newport Beach Film Festival.
While “Forked” ostensibly hones in on the struggles of opening a restaurant, Lachman says her documentary goes beyond the challenges of industry enterprise. “How does one scrape themselves off the sidewalk? Because that’s the measure of success in life, how you deal with failure,” she says.
Street was hotly anticipated when it opened in 2009, and quickly gathered attention (the late critic Jonathan Gold described it as “halfway between a sophisticated cocktail party and a political act”), but by 2013 it had shuttered after “it didn’t do what it was designed or supposed to do,” says the filmmaker. Feniger adds, “I loved the food and I loved the team we created, because it was very small and intimate. Many people have come up to me (since it closed), like at Border Grill, and say how it was their favorite restaurant experience, ever.” To which she would jokingly reply, “Well you didn’t come enough, clearly.”
A decade later, Street’s model of global street food might draw comparisons to The Bear’s “chaos menu” (if you know, you know), or a wild collision of cultures. The film follows Feniger (who co-owned the short-lived restaurant with Kajsa Alger, also featured in the documentary) from the early stages of the restaurant’s construction on Highland Avenue to international locales for menu creation.
“We went to Vietnam, Shanghai and Singapore to do street food tasting,” says Lachman. “I covered everything. I don’t know how I did it, but it’s all in there.”
“When I put the film together, I realized, in the end, the story is not about the restaurant, it’s the story of Susan,” says Lachman. “Her life didn’t end with the restaurant. So, what did she do? How did she get over that?”
Feniger chimes in saying that although Street was a personal endeavor, she didn’t let its end alter her passion for her decades-long career in the culinary world. (She opened Mud Hen Tavern in its place, which closed after nearly three years in business.) “In every field people have success and failures, and it all depends on how the failures affect them — and what they do or don’t do next.”
The film, which Lachman shot from 2009 to 2010 and later in 2021 and 2022, also features recognizable names like Bobby Flay, Wolfgang Puck (with whom Feniger worked during a stint as a line cook at Ma Maison, shortly before Puck opened Spago) and longtime business partner and friend Mary Sue Milliken.
The couple, who live together in Brentwood’s Crestwood Hills enclave, met one afternoon during a blind date — but not their own.
“We met at Border Grill in Santa Monica and Liz was there with two other women I knew, and with another who was her blind date,” says Feniger, who kept coming to the table to talk to everyone except for Liz.
“She would look at everyone at the table except for me and at first I thought, ‘Wow, she’s so rude,’ but then I remembered how when I was a waitress and I thought a customer was attractive, I couldn’t look them in the eyes when they ordered.”
The two, now married, have been together for 28 years. Feniger continues to run her restaurant empire, including Border Grill’s Las Vegas outpost and Socalo, her and Milliken’s latest joint effort.
Feniger and Lachman will make an appearance at the Newport Beach Film Festival later this month for the screening of “Susan Feniger: Forked,” an event that will include a moderated question-and-answer session with the couple, some of Feniger’s signature fare, and other appearances by culinary notables. The all-inclusive reception and film entrance will cost $150; film-only passes are $20.
