Samir is a sous chef in Manhattan. He quits when he's not promoted - his boss says his cooking lacks soul. He decides to find an unpaid internship in Paris, but his father suffers a heart attack keeping him home for a few weeks. Samir must run the family's failing Indian restaurant in Queens. He can't cook Indian food, so things get dire when the chef quits: Samir tracks down Akbar, a cabbie who claims to have cooked for British royalty in Bombay. Akbar cooks with mind, heart, and gut - and offers philosophy as well. With the help of Carrie, whom he met at the Manhattan restaurant, Samir begins to enjoy the work. But will his father approve, and if not, what then?

Lucien and Regina gather wild mushrooms in the woodlands of New Jersey and sell them to restaurants in New York. Their lifestyle is simple, their income unstable. Regina decides to take a full-time job cooking at a high-end restaurant to improve their financial security and to follow a more fulfilling personal career path. Feeling threatened, Lucien proposes that instead of selling out, they give up their apartment and drive to the more-profitable West Coast as full-time itinerant foragers. As individual desires take them down divergent paths over the course of a year, their marriage is put to a test.