Dinner With Beatriz, starring Salma Hayek and John Lithgow.
For some reason I got fooled into thinking this would be Bunuelian. No. It should have been titled "Dinner with PETA".
Beatriz is a 'healer'. A Mexican immigrant whose legal status is deliberately vague, she's a healer by virtue of nothing but on-the-job massage training and a serious love of animals who lives in Santa Monica and travels south to Newport Beach to give a massage at the fabulous home of a fabulously wealthy client. (Ludicrously, her journey is represented by a segment of freeway travel showing her whirring past the Chesebro offramp of the 101 which is up around Calabassas, about 30 miles in the wrong direction north of where she starts out. To get to NB from SM, one does not take the 101, any portion of it! With all the freeway footage they could have made or gotten their hands on, this mistake is ridiculous and puts one on the offense to be hypercritical of everything that comes after. And I was.)
Post-massage, her car won't start so she ends up staying for dinner and being rude and accusatory to the mega wealthy big-game-hunting industrial developer (Lithgow) who is one of that evening's guests and there to celebrate a new deal in which everyone else present was also involved. She's so pure and they're all so predictably clueless about the negative effects of their presence on the planet. YAWN.
The only part that involved food was when the server arrives in the dining room to take main course orders, which achieves nothing but to give the writers a chance to trot out another cliche. The choice was filet mignon or halibut. Beatriz, a vegetarian, declines meat, the evil deal-makers went for the beef, and the evil-by-association types went halibut.
Another note about locations: this was written by Mike White, who in fact did write the hilarious movie "Orange County"--so of course the baddies have to live in Orange County and the heroine has to come from the more-enlightened Los Angeles County.
Anyway: AVOID!
