‘A man of great appetites’: what’s it like to be a dictator’s personal chef?

What happened

According to The Guardian’s source item, ‘A man of great appetites’: what’s it like to be a dictator’s personal chef?, In an often chilling new documentary, the chefs of brutal leaders from Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein, talk about their unusual lives behind the scenes Kim Jong-il loved pepperoni pizza. Saddam Hussein couldn’t resist a fish barbecue. Idi Amin reportedly had the capacity for an entire roasted goat. The menus may have differed, but the appetite was the same. For history’s most notorious strongmen, the dining table doubled as a stage for power. For the cooks who served them, every meal came with extraordinary stakes. “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.” In his latest film, How to Feed a Dictator, which premieres at the Tribeca film festival this week, five private chefs recount their intimate experiences ser

Context

The development sits in VINI’s Culture file for readers following arts, entertainment, fashion, film, music, celebrity, and the business of culture. The original report is linked so readers can check the source account, follow later updates, and compare new coverage against the first published record. The source item is dated 2026-06-09T10:00:49+00:00.

What to watch

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Source

Primary source: ‘A man of great appetites’: what’s it like to be a dictator’s personal chef? via The Guardian. VINI cites and links the source; it does not reproduce the publisher’s full article text without rights clearance.