Maybe Fatih Akin’s “Soul Kitchen” shouldn’t come as the joyous surprise that it does. Most of its ingredients can be found in his previous films: the humor and passion of “Head-On,” the don’t-give-a-damn daring of “The Edge Of Heaven,” the phenomenal energy of the Istanbul music documentary “Across the Bridge.” All the same, who knew this German-born Turkish filmmaker could perpetrate a delirious farce—in German and Greek with good English subtitles—that doesn’t flag for a single one of its 99 minutes?

The charming nebbish at the eye of the tornado that passes for a plot is a young German-Greek restaurant owner named Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos). Restaurant may be an unduly upscale name for Zinos’s establishment; it’s more of a diner housed in a scruffy warehouse in a worn-out Hamburg neighborhood. Still, the clientele loves the down-home cooking and the funky music. The notion of home is central here, a place where members of an ad hoc family can come together. But so is the notion of food. The plot plunges into incipient chaos when Zinos joins his biological family at an elegant restaurant, watches the chef go ballistic after a customer demands hot gazpacho, then convinces the prima donna to cook for his hash house.

Hot gazpacho as a flash point recalls an early crisis in a wonderful American movie called “Big Night,” when a temperamental Italian chef refuses a couple’s demand for spaghetti with their risotto. And “Soul Kitchen” recalls another short and brilliantly funny German movie because of its co-star and its pell-mell style. Zinos’s brother Illias, a jailbird out on parole, is played by Moritz Bleibtreu. He was Manni, the dim-bulb drug courier in “Run Lola Run,” Tom Tykwer’s one-of-a-kind whirligig in which Franka Potente’s Lola runs and runs to save poor Manni’s life.

In its gleefully anarchic way “Soul Kitchen” is also one of a kind, although pinning down the kind can be tricky. It runs and runs through the above-mentioned farce (preposterous complications ensue when Illias’s gambling habit puts the restaurant at risk) into patches of inspired slapstick (Zinos’s life takes a wrenching turn for the worse when his lower back betrays him) and outbursts of opera buffa that involve, among others, a nymphomaniacal tax collector, an aged Greek sailor named Aristotle and a Turkish chiropractor called Kemal the Bone Cruncher.

Remarkably, though, Mr. Akin’s little movie, which goes into national distribution starting next week, has a heart big enough to make us care about Zinos’s hapless search for love. It’s a modern flavor of love, with no layers of conventional development, and all traces of sentiment squeezed out. Yet there’s poignance in the hero’s fraught relationship with Nadine (Pheline Roggan), an ethereal beauty who wants him to live with her in Shanghai; there’s even poignance in the sound of his Skype program closing down after an international call. And romance fills the smoky air from the moment a hard-drinking, super-literate barmaid named Lucia Faust appears on screen; she’s played, alluringly, by Anna Bederke. So you could call “Soul Kitchen” a romance with sensational music, or a hymn to friendship with romantic resonances. Whatever you want to call it, the thing is bursting with life.