| Director | Alonso Ruizpalacios |
|---|---|
| Budget | $770,000 |
| Box office | $249,115 |
Rashid, a successful Arab American entrepreneur, runs "The Grill", a large upscale Times Square tourist trap. The kitchen, located underground, is staffed by undocumented immigrants, mostly Latin Americans with some Arabs, who must work at breakneck speed in the rush hours to fulfill the orders brought to them by the waitresses who are predominantly white Americans. Rashid regularly promises to obtain for the cooks a legal status in the US, but fails to act on such promises.
Estela, a newly arrived Hispanic immigrant who does not speak English, comes to work in The Grill as she knows Pedro, one of the cooks, and gets introduced at record speed to its staff and the restaurant's rough ways. Pedro, a charming, hot-tempered Mexican cook, and his girlfriend Julia, one of the waitresses, quarrel over their relationship, with some accusing Pedro of dating Julia only to get his visa. Relationships between Hispanics and "Gringos", and specifically, between male Latin American immigrants and female "Gringas", are a constant subject in the conversations of the kitchen staff.
Julia is pregnant and determined to get an abortion while Pedro, deeply in love with Julia, wants her to keep the child and engages in a fantasy of the two of them running away to an unspoiled beach in Mexico, where his son could run free on the shore. However, Pedro does get her the money needed for the abortion and she eventually goes through with it, alone.
After an incredibly tense first shift, where a broken soda machine causes the kitchen to flood, the employees take their break. When asked about their dreams by Pedro, Nonzo, the dessert cook, tells a strange story of an handicapped immigrant who was touched twice by a "green light", the first time saving him from deportation. When asked about the second encounter, Nonzo says he doesn't know what he was saying.
During another shift, Pedro gets in trouble; first for responding violently to a provocation by a fellow cook, then for generously giving to a hungry homeless vagrant one of the restaurant's treasured lobsters. To cap it all, $823 in cash is reported to have disappeared from a restaurant register, and Pedro is suspected of being the thief as it amounts to the cost of Julia's abortion. Eventually, the lost money is discovered under a desk and it turns out there was no theft.
Weakened after her abortion, Julia faints in the kitchen, and Pedro is shocked to discover that Julia had concealed from him the fact that she is already a mother, raising the ten year old Abe alone. Enraged, Pedro becomes unhinged after an altercation with a waitress, embarking on a wild rampage in both the underground kitchen and the plush restaurant upstairs, overturning tables, destroying equipment and bringing the restaurant to a standstill. When Rashid confronts Pedro, he remains silent, covered in an eerie green light that also engulfs Estela.