"Soul Kitchen" is Zinos Kazantsakis's restaurant in a working-class neighborhood of Hamburg. The food is mostly frozen, unceremoniously zapped in the microwave, or thrown into a vat of bubbling grease. He loves his restaurant and his girlfriend Nadine, even when she leaves him for an assignment in China. On a whim, Zinos hires an out-of-work three-star chef, lets his ex-con brother Ilias spin records, and soon Soul Kitchen is reborn as Hamburg's newest hot spot. There is also a slipped disc, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking waitress, a scheming real-estate developer, a Turkish "physio-healer," and a high stakes poker game in the mix. But the film is not about food, or love, but about family, life and human relationships, with a lingering nostalgia for a time when eating out implied getting dead drunk, stuffing one's face with cholesterol and kissing across the table.