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Imagine being a chef charged with creating a meal of local cuisine for a group of guests. Now imagine you're not familiar with the city and the cuisine, have no idea where to get the ingredients and the guests might not get along. That's the stress and the challenge chef Michael Voltaggio faced on Travel Channel's Sunday series "Breaking Borders," in which he goes to sites of international conflict such as Jerusalem or Northern Ireland to prepare meals for guests of opposing viewpoints. "I had to decompress after we shot each episode," he says with a laugh. Voltaggio's process begins when he arrives four days prior to the dinner. He would interview guests, find out which local restaurants and dishes they like, go there, sample them and make notes. "Then I just sort of get lost in the markets ...," Voltaggio explains. "So there are moments when I taste something somewhere and a light goes off in my head and I get an idea. And so I keep writing these ideas down throughout the week, and then the day of the dinner I actually go shopping for the food and I try and gather all of those notes and thoughts and put them together and hopefully communicate that back to the guests in each dish that I prepare. ... For me, the food is my opportunity to share my experiences with everyone and I tell my story through the food that I cook." The dinner is served and consumed, opposing viewpoints are exchanged and hopefully everyone comes away more enlightened. For Voltaggio's part, he heard no negative reviews of his work. "It's the comments and the compliments that came out of their mouths," he says. "That's when it hit home that I was cooking food for a much bigger reason. Not necessarily for people who are just entitled to eat or want to eat but in some cases needed to eat or needed to sit down to a good meal and have a conversation." Michael Voltaggio fashions international detente through food on 'Breaking Borders' What book are you currently reading? "Alex and Aki, they have this website called Ideas in Food, and they just put out a whole book about gluten-free baking and basically gluten-free anything. And I don't remember the name of it because I just opened it and started reading it. ... They've basically written recipes for, gram for gram, gluten-free flours that you can still cook with ... . To me this is a book that's going to change the game." What did you have for dinner last night? "Last night, we ate at a restaurant called Cosme. It's a new restaurant in New York. ... Octopus with molé, we had duck carnitas ... and a husk meringue with a corn mousse inside of it. The guy is a genius and we definitely had some great food last night." What is your next project? "To go back to my restaurant and focus on cooking and my staff and stuff like that for a while, and hopefully get back out on the road." When was the last vacation you took, where and why? "I could say with all honesty that I don't think I've ever actually just gone on vacation before. ... Usually when I travel, it's related to work." BY GEORGE DICKIE Hugh Jackman, haven't you done this before? Co-star with a robot, that is. Those familiar with "Real Steel" have every right to ask that upon seeing "Chappie," an action- fantasy that has a streak of humor as it tells the near-future saga of a police machine reprogrammed to do the bidding of a group of bad guys in South Africa. Dev Patel ("Slumdog Millionaire," "The Newsroom") supplies the brains as the science whiz who knows how Chappie and the other robots operate, while Jackman furnishes the expected brawn as the detective who has to convince his boss (Sigourney Weaver, in the kind of role she knows like her own name) to let him handle the hijacked-Chappie problem his way. It's very easy to trace the roots of "Chappie" back to "RoboCop" – right down to a big robot vs. robot battle – but even if the plot doesn't seem all that inventive, director Neill Blomkamp knows what to do with it visually. After "District 9" and "Elysium," he's established himself as the master of depicting grim future worlds on the screen. The look of "Chappie" gives the picture much of its gravitas, and there's value in that even when the script seems somewhat warmed over from other entries in the genre. Blomkamp's mantra seems to be, "the dirtier, the better," meaning "dirty" in the "glum and unattractive" sense. To that end, Jackman's innate charisma gets downplayed, since the robots really are the stars here. That's a notable difference from "Real Steel," in which the actor's warmth was used to draw out the human (if you will) quality of the machines. Of the human performers, Patel fares the best, as a fellow who comes to recognize how much trouble he creates and then tries to set things right. "Chappie" has two basic spheres of appeal: to those who appreciate filmmaker Blomkamp's post-apocalyptic sensibility; and to fans of man-and-machine or man vs. machine sagas. Taken on those levels, within a skin of metal, "Chappie" has its heart in the right place. BY JAY BOBBIN Hugh Jackman gets a robot co-star – again – in 'Chappie' Page 8 April 6 - 12, 2015

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