‘The Menu’ - Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Cold

Monday, 21 November 2022, 10:29 am
Opinion: howard davis

Swiftly slicing and dicing the pretensions of ‘haute cuisine,’ director Mark Mylod (‘Game of Thrones’ and ’Succession’) skewers the preposterous egomania of bullying chefs and the captive consumers to whom they pander. As James Croot noted, gastronomical ‘degustation’ evenings are presented as “a theatrical experience” to the well-heeled clientele who find themselves drawn to the kind of meals no one else could afford and you certainly wouldn’t want to serve at home.

Hawthorn, the fictional island restaurant depicted in the film, is a mash-up of haute-rustic destinations like Norma in Copenhagen, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, north of NYC; Mugaritz in the Basque Country, the Willows in the Pacific Northwest, and chef Francis Mallman’s private island off the coast of Patagonia. In such restaurants, fawned over by food critics and awards panels, but affordable only by wealthy gastro-tourists, chefs are not considered mere cooks, but rather “storytellers” who are not just feeding people, but “weaving a tale of senses, gestures, and emotions.”

The restaurant has its own shellfish beds, where diners watch their dinner being harvested. It boasts a “Nordic-style smokehouse,” free-range goats, and the wines are “hyperdecanted.” The celebrity chef (Ralph Fiennes playing the kind of quietly demented camp commandant he first mastered in ‘Schindler’s List’)) may be male, but the director of the dining room is a woman deliriously over-played by Hong Chau, who enforces his strict rules. Dishes are delivered by a coordinated cadre of cooks in pristine white shirts and roughspun aprons.

The plot has many outlandish twists, but the food is all too real, like the “breadless bread course” of gelatinous dips and emulsions. According to Julia Moskin, many details were not invented for laughs, but lifted from actual restaurants. The spice racks are replicated from the kitchen at the (now shuttered) Spanish restaurant El Bulli, homemade granola in gift bags are a nod to Eleven Madison Park, and the idea of the “perfectly unripe” strawberry is lifted from chef René Redzepi of Noma. A course of a single raw scallop, perched on a craggy rock surrounded by carefully tweezed seaweed and algae, is indistinguishable from an actual dish available at San Francisco’s Atelier Crenn. This is not coincidental - Dominique Crenn, the only female chef in the US to attain three Michelin stars, designed all the equally ridiculous dishes in the ten-course meal and ensured that other culinary details were authentic.

Mylod said that recreating a modern fine-dining kitchen was disturbing. Long hours, sexual harassment, and verbal abuse are among the horrors inflicted by head bully Slowik and the system he represents. “We were reading the exposé as we were shooting,” he said of the NYT’s reporting on the Willows, a restaurant on a remote island in Washington State.

The twelve guests are assembled like well-upholstered apostles attending some deranged Last Supper, each having paid $1,250 for the privilege of a four hour and twenty-eight minute meal planned in meticulous detail by Slowik. Little do they know what to expect in this macabre variation on an Agatha Christie country house murder mystery, in which plate loads of bitter recriminations and increasingly violent surprises are served up cold.

While the movie may do little to whet the appetite, it more than satisfies with lashings of hepatic bile, the two main pigments of which are yellow bilirubin and its oxidised form, green biliverdin (when mixed, they are responsible for the brown color of feces). 400-800 millilitres of bile is produced per day in adult human beings, more than enough to go round in this black comedy of bleak table manners.

Screenwriter and co-producer Will Tracy, the filmmaking team’s main food lover, came up with the idea while visiting Bergen, Norway, when he took a boat to a fancy restaurant on a nearby private island and realized they were stuck there until the meal was over. ‘La Grande Bouffe’ may have done it first (and better), but there is plenty to relish in this sumptuous display of rapacity and greed.

“This movie probably wouldn’t have happened without ‘Mind of a Chef’ and ‘Chef’s Table’,” said Tracy, referring to the sort of behind-the-kitchen-door TV shows that have been streaming hits over the last decade. The producers hired David Gelb, creator of the ‘Chef’s Table’ series, as second-unit director to film Hawthorn in precisely the same style as his earlier shows, with lingering close-ups of blue flames, shining tweezers, herb gardens, and perfectly arrayed dots of food.

“The more serious you are about something that seems silly, the funnier the work gets,” said Tracy, who knows all about parody, having written for ‘The Onion’ for many years with his creative partner Seth Reiss. Worst of all is Tyler, the needy, aggressive know-it-all who has watched every episode of ‘Chef’s Table’ “two or three times” and can’t help showing off that he knows that a Packet is an expensive countertop freezer that makes ice creams, sorbets, and snows. Many of the cast and crew were tempted to sample the delicacies between takes and had to be constantly reminded that the food items were predominantly inedible props.

The ensemble cast is uniformly excellent, with Nicholas Hoult (‘Peter the Great’) as a self-obsessed foodie buff(oon) unerringly resembling Jared Kushner and the always delectable Janet McTeer (‘Ozark’) playing a renowned restaurant critic. Amy Taylor-Joy (‘The Queen’s Gambit’) manages to be both cute and tough, resolutely refusing to be intimidated by Slowik’s early pronouncement that “chefs play with the raw materials of life and death.” John Leguizamo may have based his fading movie star on Steven Seagal (with whom he co-starred in ‘Executive Decision’), but it is Hong Chau, dressed in stylishly austere black and white, who really stands out.

Clever inter-titles punctuate the narrative arc and there are plenty of great lines casually tossed aside and easily missed. Personal favourite - “You have to try the mouthfeel of the mignonette.”

© Scoop Media

Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz