A talented Fil-Am restaurateur returns to his country of birth where he is challenged by an unscrupulous boyhood friend, with a promise of co-ownership, to transform his failing Manila restaurant to number one on TripAdvisor.

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Title: Crab Mentality
Genre: Dramedy

Ray(58), returns to the Philippines on holiday having fled the brutal Marcos regime in his youth. On the ride from the airport he encourages the taxi driver to be his personal driver where he learns about his country during his absence. In this same journey, he decides on a spontaneous visit to his rich boyhood friend, Lorenzo. Upon finding that Ray is involved in the restaurant industry in New York, Lorenzo manipulates him to run one of his many businesses, an ailing Manila restaurant, with an incentive of 50% ownership if it reaches a number 1 TripAdvisor rating. Ray revamps the restaurant and hires new front end staff consisting of nearby catering students where he teaches them the restaurant trade along with his wisdom as a well-travelled elder. In various treacherous ways, Lorenzo interruptss the restaurant’s progression in order not to honor their agreement. But a defiant and savvy Ray, assisted by his young team’s knowledge of social media turn the fortunes of the restaurant to the best in Manila…with its own in-house chauffeur.

7 reviews

My two cents:
As a reader, I had to Google "Fil-Am" and to futureproof your premise, maybe use "… restaurant into a top 10 culinary destination" instead of TripAdvisor.

Apologies Richiev, the logline about an Embassy Gardener was from another script.

Here is another stab of the current logline...

An experienced Fil-Am restaurateur struggles with sabotage and social media when an unscrupulous boyhood friend challenges him, with a promise of co-ownership, to transform an ailing Manila restaurant into number 1 on TripAdvisor.

I had another stab of it...

A morally-challenged embassy gardener plans and spearheads the ransom of his heist of foreign passports to a corrupt Ambassador, while attempting to outsmart his security posse in order to fund his talented granddaughters’ education.

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