Cooking Time: Culinary Chronotope, Memory, and Skipped Generations in <i>Idli Kadai</i>

This review is an in-depth analysis of the ways food, gender, and intergenerational labor are interconnected in the Tamil film Idli Kadai (Dhanush, 2025). By a thorough reading of the film narrative and mise-en-scène, the paper argues how the modest food outlet transforms into an emotional juncture to strengthen family ties through familiar recipes, skipped‑generation dynamics, embodied skill, and socio-economic resilience. The review, by using concepts from food studies, feminist film theory and Bakhtin’s Chronotope theory, finds that the act of cooking and serving food is the way in which the characters express love, tradition, and survival in the face of patriarchal and neoliberal pressures. Thus, making Idli Kadai (Dhanush, 2025) an emotional text for the re-conceptualization of food labor as intergenerational storytelling.