A septuagenarian couple are attracted to each other in a retirement home but find the institution and their fellow patients frown on their relationship.

Two friends, one a musician the other constantly depressed wander around Greece and France till they get to Paris without a penny to their name. Here they spend nights in the underground, and squat in houses with the African immigrants. One day they both fall in love with Mathilde a blond dancer and follow her to New York.

Hippolyte, the chef at the small Paris restaurant of the title, is losing his sense of smell - and without that, you can’t cook. Not in France. The restaurant has to close. Guests and customers of the ailing master chef gather for one last fabulous meal. Between courses, personal conflicts are explored and flashbacks flesh out incidents from the lives of the restaurant owners.

The recolonization of Africa, this time by the very blacks who had to flee it as exiles during the time of the original French occupation, is the theme of this political comedy. Adiza, who has been living well in France, has decided that she will return and buy the plantation she and her compatriots were expelled from, and enlists some unlikely helpers to bring them back into the country and enact their plot. Meanwhile, these "local" blacks are unwittingly accepted by the other landowners as more cheap labor.