A serene Sunday night dinner ritual appears like a great way to get a family together every week to enjoy each other’s company and eat wonderful food. Each week all members of the family are expected to be at the table ready to converse and feast upon a delicious meal prepared lovingly at home. It is ideal for a busy modern family who eats on the run and sees very little of each other. However, in the world of filmmaker Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman and for the three daughters of the most revered chef in Taipei, the Sunday night dinner ritual is something to dread. The modern Chinese family doesn’t communicate well, if at all, and their aging father is quickly loosing his sense of taste. Each Sunday they gather together, and the unappreciative daughters pick at the food and at each other. As their lives change drastically, the Sunday dinners become more and more interesting and they appear to even be enjoying themselves. The food that Chef Chu (Sihung Lung) lovingly and cautiously prepares for his daughters is used to reach out to their modernized lives and shoe the love he feels for them; first though, they must go through regret, contempt, hate, acceptance, and eventually love. The food their Sunday dinners revolve around leads them through this journey.

The time before the first Sunday dinner proves how much each of the girls dread the time they are forced to spend eating a lackluster dinner with their father and each other. The middle daughter, Jia-Chen’s (Chien-lien Wu) first substantial scene portrays her sleeping with an ex-boyfriend, to whom she refers to the dinners as “The Sunday dinner torture ritual”. The youngest of the three, Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang) expresses her dislike of the ritual to her friend and co-worker at the Wendy’s fast food restaurant at which she works. The idea if her working at such an American establishment itself shows her modernized life and betrayal of her father’s traditional ideals. She confesses to her co-worker that if she is late one more time to a Sunday night dinner due to her work schedule, her father will “kill her”; obediently, she makes it to the dinner on time. The eldest daughter Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang) is concerned mainly with her Western Religion of Christianity, and does not vocalize her dislike of the Sunday dinners. However much the girls may dislike getting together with their family, each Sunday they appear, until things begin to rapidly change.

The first dinner starts off sedately; no one speaks or touches their food at first. It seems that there is much hesitation to eat, as well as to begin to communicate. The first endeavor, however, is made by Chu himself, though he abruptly stops what he was saying as he views the look on Jia-Chen ’s face. After denying that nothing is wrong, she criticizes her father’s cooking and immediately expresses the first of many Sunday night announcements--that she is moving out. Although this is an important part to her story, it is more important to realize that her aspersion is the only way she says anything negative to her father’s face. It is clear that there is much tension between these two, perhaps the most of all the daughters, and these two communicate the least. After Jia-Chen openly denounces the food her father has prepared, Jia-Ning is quick to make excuses for Chu, though she does not deny that his sense of taste is quickly faltering. This is an important part of Chu’s outlook on life; his love for cooking has abandoned him, just as his love for his daughters has brought him nowhere but confusion.

When their father leaves dinner abruptly and the girls are left to pick up, Jia-Jen and Jia-Ning express their contempt that Jia-Chen is able to move out of the house and embark on a new part of her life. They quibble about their situation, as they throw the food their father made them in containers for leftovers they are surely not going to touch. Their dislike for the food is apparent simply by the way they treat it. Their body language while they pick up says that they don’t care about this food of the dinners; it is very symbolic of their feelings for each other. Their relationship is a circle of bitterness, for a variety of reasons, which translates to the food that chef Chu’s taste buds can no longer explore.

The death of their mother about sixteen years ago clearly has been a trouble for the whole family. It appears that this is where the communication break down began, without the common ground of the same sex parent to apply to the family. Chu says little about the childhood of the girls, except that they were spoiled as children. As they grew older and more mature and still lived under his roof, their lives appeared to confuse him more. A humorous example of this is Chu doing the laundry and attempting to pull apart a clutter of pantyhose, bras and underwear from the machine. Later on, he continuously puts the wrong underwear in the wrong girl’s bedrooms, showing further that he does not know his daughters. To make up for this, Chu cooks. He sautés, steams, simmers, boils, broils, and fries his emotions and puts them on a delicate plate for his daughters. As he loses his sense of taste, he looses his daughters’ appreciation for this. Cooking can no longer satisfy the emotions that are left unspoken.

The sexual relationships of the girls are exposed with more insight after the initial Sunday night dinner, and they begin to form in new ways. As Jia-Chen continues a purely sexual relationship with an ex-boyfriend, she reveals many of her important ties to food. They often go out to eat, until one night she appears with a bag full of groceries and proclaims that she wants to cook for him. Here she cooks in a style very similar to her father’s; large and traditional. She opens up to her lover a lot this night, revealing her relationship with her father when she was young, and her love of cooking. The large hotel in which Chu was employed was where Jia-Chen learned to cook, hence her and her father’s need to cook in such large quantities; however, her father would regularly force her to leave the kitchen. He had high hopes for her to go to a university, and be more than a chef. Even at this point in her life, her father banished her from the kitchen. He wanted more for her than the life of a chef, regardless of what she wanted. She fulfilled these things but it’s obvious that Jia-Chen was not content in the life she was leading. She still desired to cook, and much of the dislike of her father’s cooking appears to stem from this; she holds a lot of contempt about the situation. Away from her home, she allowed her cooking to work as a catharsis. She was able to do something she loved, against her father’s will and without him knowing.

Another huge revelation occurs on the Sunday night dinner in which Jia-Ning leaves the house abruptly. She moves out on this night after inadvertently stealing her friend’s boyfriend, and becoming pregnant. This leaves the eldest daughters left, which reveals more about the family as the two of them do the dishes; it seems that much as the food brings them together the entirety of Sunday nights do this effectively, as they communicate once the food is away. The two remaining daughters are left to clean up; again they begin to argue. It is clear that their rocky relationship has spanned years as they bicker about their life after their mother’s death, among other things. It is clear their inability to communicate stemmed far into the past, after they seem to patch up years of insecurities and doubts about each other. While the eldest daughter took it upon herself to act as motherly as possible (and she still does), Jia-Chen felt that she was being pushed away from her older sister, and she never reached out. “I thought you hated me,” Jia-Jen emotes. Jia-Chen immediately denies this, as her sister sheds a tear and breaks a plate in the process. This is the first time the ice melts, and it opens up a floodgate of good attitudes and acceptance in their later relationship.

Eventually, Jia-Jen, who is described as the old maid, surprises everyone by getting married and moving out of the house, leaving Jia-Chen the only daughter left. This finally gives Chu the ability to say what he’s presumably been trying to say since the first dinner. He invites all of his daughters, their significant others, and the close family friends Jin-Rong (Sylvia Chang) her daughter Shan-Shan (Yu-Chien Tang) and Madame Liang (Ah Lei Gua) to the form Sunday night dinner. Although these characters are prominent to the plot, they are not quite as important to the core family problem that is focused on Chu and his three daughters. The dinner starts off exuberantly; everyone is enjoying themselves, and extensively talking, eating, and drinking. No one complains about the quality or taste of food, and the entire meal is considerably more lighthearted that the previous ones were. In the short time since the two daughters moved out, everyone begins to communicate and connect with one another, which does wonders for everyone in the family. Chu makes his big announcement; he is selling the house and moving and has been harboring a secret romance with Jin-Rong for quite awhile. This is a huge shock for everyone, as Jin-Rong was held as almost a fourth daughter to him, being around the same age as Jia-Jen. The dinner ends in a catastrophic way, with Madame Liang fainting and throwing an absolute fit.

Within all of the drastic changes in these complex characters’ lives, food held them to the roots of their family and subtly reminded them of their father’s love for cooking, and for themselves. The food they ate sometimes held them back from spilling out their true feelings, and also rooted them to why they felt the way they did. It helped to bind them together when nothing else would, except the communication they were unable to achieve. The final scene is the final Sunday night dinner, though it is quite different from all the previous ones. The same appetizing food appears, and there are intense cooking scenes involved before the food is consumed, but it is also bringing closure. Only Chu and Jia-Chen are present, and they sit down quietly to eat. Chu criticizes Jia-Chen’s soup immediately after he eats it, telling her “you put too much ginger in the soup." Jia-Chen is defensive toward this, until her father bewilderedly takes another spoonful. At the same time, both realize that his sense of taste has returned, and they share a touching moment, both seeming to finally understand each other. The food that surrounded them in all aspects of their lives helped guide them through a careful journey of familial love. The food would not allow Chu to be a complete man until his family was able to communicate and show each other the love they had for one another.