Young restaurant owner Zinos is down on his luck. His girlfriend Nadine has moved to Shanghai, his Soul Kitchen customers are boycotting the new gourmet chef, and he’s having back trouble! Things start looking up when the hip crowd embraces his revamped culinary concept, but that doesn‘t mend Zinos’s broken heart. He decides to fly to China for Nadine, leaving the restaurant in the hands of his unreliable ex-con brother Illias. Both decisions turn out disastrous: Illias gambles away the restaurant to a shady real estate agent and Nadine has found a new lover! But brothers Zinos and Illias might still have one last chance to get Soul Kitchen back if they can stop arguing and work together as a team.

The idea for SOUL KITCHEN has been there for a while now. I always had to think about my old friend Adam Bousdoukos and his Taverna in the Ottensen quarter of Hamburg. This was more than just a restaurant for us: it was a playground for adventure, a collecting tank, a place to celebrate, a home. I wanted to capture that feeling and way of life that I so deeply connect with the Taverna, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it had I been much older. I can’t party forever or go out on the town five nights a week anymore. At some point, you start to get headaches, you find the music too loud, you can’t handle all the smoke. We’re getting older, and that’s okay, because at some point this lifestyle simply disappears. Yet, making a film about it is still valuable because in the end it’s about an existential issue. It’s about drinking, eating, partying, dancing and about home. I wanted to make a film about home, not one that is defined by any nationality, not Germany or Turkey, home not as a location but as a state of being and an attitude.