Yann (Guillaume Canet) trained as a chef and walks with a chef’s swagger. It’s as easy for him to boast about his future plans as it is to pick up a woman in a bar, in this case the beautiful Nadia (Leila Bekhti). What he can’t seem to do is find the right job in Paris’s cutthroat restaurant world.

Yann, a cook, and Nadia, a waitress and mother of nine-year-old child, decide to risk everything on the purchase of a restaurant. With plenty of talent, energy, love and dreams, but no finances of their own, they find themselves forced into a jungle of financing and bank loans that quickly overwhelms them. To bail them out, Nadia has to take a job in Canada, while Yann is forced to stay behind to save the restaurant. Together, he and the child confront a relentless avalanche of creditors, an uncaring system and the daily grind from which there is no respite. Yann finally understands that his only chance of salvation lies in joining his lover – as well as reuniting mother and child – by following Nadia to Canada and a better life.