Eat and let eat: Dragon Restaurant and who gets to tell the story

Editor's Note: Teng Jimeng, a special commentator for CGTN, is a film critic. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

When the movie Once Upon a Time in the Middle East opens in the shadow of the Gulf War, its premise seems deceptively simple. Based on a real story from the 1991–92 conflict, this film, directed by Wen Muye, tells the story of Chinese chef Xu Fu, whose restaurant in Baghdad becomes an unlikely refuge for journalists, doctors, refugees, and children caught in the crossfire. The character is inspired by Chen Xianzhong, a Chinese restaurateur from Liaoning Province who actually ran an eatery in Baghdad during the war.

In that sense, Once Upon a Time in the Middle East might initially seem like a Chinese Hotel Rwanda: an ordinary man trapped inside a geopolitical catastrophe, using whatever resources he has to protect people whom history has reduced to statistics. But the movie's ambitions are larger. Beneath its antiwar story is a more consequential question: Who has the right to tell the story of war – and to define justice, peace and universal human values?

That question becomes particularly timely with the film's arrival in North America. After opening nationwide in China on August 11, the movie became one of the major hits of the 2026 summer season, surpassing 1.6 billion Chinese yuan ($238.4 million) in its first two weeks and continuing to climb. Its international rollout began in September, with theatrical releases in several Asia-Pacific markets, followed by other territories. The film is scheduled to open in North American theaters on September 11.

Its journey from a Chinese box-office success to a North American theatrical release gives the film an importance beyond its commercial performance. It is not simply a Chinese film about the Middle East arriving in America. It is a Chinese film attempting to tell a story about the world from a Chinese perspective.

For decades, Hollywood has overwhelmingly shaped the global cinematic memory of Middle Eastern wars. American soldiers are protagonists or rescuers; Arabs are often terrorists or people awaiting rescue. What happened before the arrival of American troops – how people lived, why societies collapsed and how resistance emerged – is frequently pushed into the background.

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East enters that familiar landscape from a different direction.

Xu Fu is neither an American soldier nor an Iraqi militant. He has no grand political mission. He wants to make money, repay his debts, and keep his restaurant alive. Precisely because he is an outsider without an obvious ideological agenda, his perspective becomes powerful. His apparent lack of a political position becomes a position in itself.

The film thus marks a shift from China being the object of narration to becoming the narrator.

The politics of the dinner table

One of the film's most revealing moments is an argument about Chinese food.

When Lao Zha suggests that Xu Fu prepare Chinese dishes suited to local tastes, Xu Fu objects to the familiar Americanized versions of Chinese cuisine – General Tso's chicken and Li Hongzhang chop suey. His irritation is not merely a chef's professional pride. It raises a larger question: Who gets to define China?

Both dishes illustrate how one culture can be interpreted, repackaged, and eventually presented back to the world as an “authentic” representation of another. Xu Fu refuses to surrender that authority.

Yet the movie does not turn cultural sovereignty into isolation. At a wedding, Xu Fu creates his own dish, combining Chinese cooking with local spices and techniques. His "Xu Fu rice stew" is neither purely Chinese nor purely Iraqi. It is something new, produced through contact.

That distinction matters. Cultural confidence does not require cultural purity. It means entering a dialogue without giving up the right to speak.

The Dragon Restaurant itself embodies this principle. A restaurant is a place where strangers sit at the same table, eat together and, for a moment, share a common space. Outside is war. Inside, Xu Fu cooks.

The kitchen becomes an alternative political space – not one organized around conquest or military power, but around survival and coexistence.

'Still too salty'

The film's most understated metaphor may be its recurring joke about Xu Fu's cooking.

When Xu Fu first meets Lao Zha, his food is criticized for being too salty. Later, during their flight, Xu Fu prepares the dish again, adding honey in an effort to accommodate local taste. Lao Zha tastes it and still says it is too salty.

The joke carries a larger meaning. Xu Fu has tried to adapt, but he cannot completely become someone else. Nor does the film suggest that he should.

Unlike the familiar Western fantasy in which an outsider arrives in another society believing he can understand, reform or save it, Xu Fu recognizes the limits of his own knowledge. He cannot fix Iraq. He cannot remake another society according to his own image.

That humility distinguishes the film's worldview from the more confident logic of intervention.

'They're children, too'

Xu Fu's humanity becomes most visible when he refuses to distinguish between innocent people according to political categories.

He secretly replaces the spicy water being forced down the throat of the militant leader known as "the Principal" with something less painful. Later, when Lao Zha asks why Xu Fu keeps interfering in matters that do not concern him, he answers with one of the film's defining lines:

"They're not your children."

"They're children, too."

For Xu Fu, the war orphans are not future terrorists or future soldiers. They are simply children.

This refusal to categorize becomes a form of resistance. It rejects the logic that some lives are inherently more valuable than others.

The same compassion extends to Tony, the American soldier. Tony is not presented as a simple representative of American power. He is also a young man trapped by a war he does not control, desperate to go home.

The movie therefore refuses the easy division between heroes and villains. Everyone is capable of becoming a victim, and everyone can be pushed toward becoming a perpetrator.

From Platoon to Once Upon a Time in the Middle East

This approach reminded me of a film class I audited at New York University in 1999 with the distinguished film scholar Robert Sklar. The course, Vietnam War in American Film, included Oliver Stone's Platoon. I still remember Sklar's response to a student's question about how the film could make American audiences confront the consequences of the military-industrial complex.

His point was that Stone did not need to lecture viewers about who was right and who was wrong. The images themselves made audiences confront suffering and moral ambiguity.

Wen Muye employs a similar strategy. As he explained in an interview, "We don't want to make a film filled with hatred. We hope that through the fate of ordinary people, audiences will think about the nature of war."

That is why the film doesn't rely on military spectacle to make its argument. Its most powerful images are intimate: a child, a frightened soldier, a kitchen, a meal, a family trying to survive.

The kitchen fire becomes more meaningful than the battlefield.

The Dragon Restaurant as metaphor

The title ultimately takes on a broader political meaning.

The Dragon Restaurant can be read as a metaphor for China's position in the world – not the world's policeman, but a participant who brings something to the table.

The restaurant offers an alternative model of international engagement. People eat together. They trade. They negotiate. They survive.

That may sound modest compared with the grand language of geopolitics. But the film deliberately makes modesty its strength.

Xu Fu does not save the Middle East. He does not defeat an army. He does not deliver a political manifesto.

He cooks.

And in a world consumed by war, cooking becomes an unexpectedly radical act: feeding people, protecting children and preserving the ordinary rituals of life.

This is also why the film's simple insistence on "eating well" carries such emotional force. An Iraqi-born journalist from the United Arab Emirates reportedly became visibly emotional at a screening, recalling a time when having a proper meal itself was a luxury. The response captures the understanding the movie seeks to convey: During war, ordinary life is not ordinary at all.

Food becomes dignity. A meal becomes survival. A restaurant becomes refuge.

And a table becomes a place where people who have been taught to hate one another can still sit together.

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