Sarah Michelle Gellar is the chef/manager of a 70-year-old restaurant that is failing because, she feels, she can't cook. While shopping for the day's menu, she buys a basket of crabs, though she knows no recipes for them, and meets retail magnate Dylan Baker. Who has decided to open a great restaurant in Bendel's. Thanks to a magic crab in the basket, she finds things going her way with hunky Sean Patrick Flanery, who thinks she's a witch.

Everyone is good looking and capable as a performer, but here we are confronted with a popular trope of the 1990s, that no one can manage a satisfactory love life without supernatural intervention. Considering Miss Gellar's sad-sack attitude and poor self image (she imagines she is not utterly gorgeous), I found the whole thing as annoying as a Hallmark Channel movie, particularly when her whining alternates with moments of culinary triumph and dancing. Some nice location shooting around Manhattan is welcome, but the clueless way restaurateurs shop for the freshest seafood at the Union Square market, instead of Fulton Street -- which is not in the least attractive, and you would have had to deal with the Mafia in those days -- layers on the nonsense.

Dear Folks, Thank You for the movie. It is so well-destructed that it holds no pretensions from the very beginning. The soundtrack alone was marvelous. The costumes beautiful. Even the food was pretty. My daughter introduced me to this film. She watches it at least once a month, usually on the same evening as "Happily Ever After". I liked the crab. I liked the department store. The sex comment was a bit much, but it did remind me a little of the Jack Lemmon or Doris Day movies of the sixties. Anyway, thanks for the movie. It did what it was supposed to do, and then stopped.

Write if you find work,

your affectionate correspondent,

Charley Weaver

It's interesting to see Sarah Michelle Gellar play a character in a low-key fashion. I recently rented the campy (and hilarious) Cruel Intentions to see her give a performance so unbelievably over-the-top I couldn't stop laughing. Also, the less said about her role in I KNow What You Did Last Summer the better. Though impeccably shot sequences in and around New York give the film a glowing lusture, the script and the characters don't live up to the glow and seem to blend in with the scenery. It's supernatural themes seem to get left behind when there's a moment of pesky plot to spoil the visual pleasure, and I'm not convinced that anyone on screen wanted to be there at all. Also, why does a young woman on the verge of bankruptcy dress so well and have such impeccably styled hair? And why would she wear designer outfits whilst making sauces? It's odd. It seemed to be a Vogue photo essay in search of a Meg Ryan-esque romance.