THE MENU Will Feed The Darkest Part of Your Soul

If your soul happens to be creative, misanthropic, mildly socialist, and really digs black comedy.

Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy in The Menu

Regular readers of Cappuccino know I like to publicly own my shortcomings. In forums such as these, I find it’s impossible to hide from them. We naturally intuit things about writers that aren’t necessarily the words a writer puts on the page.

That said, I freely admit to a prejudice. I hate foodie culture. Not foodies themselves, although some of them can be laughably pretentious, but the culture, which I see as aristocratic excess and snobbery. I’m showing my middle-class roots here when I divulge my truth, which is that the sacred cows of foodie culture, such as emulsions, foams, and “tasting menus,” are the wildly overpriced punchline of a bad joke. To me, these food pornists are nothing more than over-indulged children who can afford to play with their food.

Food shouldn’t be “conceptual.” Food shouldn’t be “performed.” It shouldn’t be a status signifier used by diners to signal their superiority or to build a temple to a chef’s ego. It’s FOOD. It’s supposed to nourish the meat suit you live in.

Some food is more delicious than other food, I’ll grant you, but the end purpose is the same: we have to eat it, we need more of it than can usually be found on any plate at a foodie restaurant, and if you want to know why I have such a hard-on for these absurdly luxe establishments, take a look at this article I wrote about Nusret Gökçe.

You know him as Salt Bae.

“Restauranteurs” like Salt Bae need to be shoved into a sack and drowned.

Remember this guy? Of course you do.

So, my review of The Menu is, perhaps, tainted by this prejudice. But make no mistake: the whole point of this movie is not only to gleefully skewer foodie culture, but in a broader sense, artistic culture itself, which is why, as a starving writer partnered with a jazz musician, I felt so seen. Every single day, we experience what Ralph Fiennes’ Chef Slowik rails against so impactfully in The Menu when he introduces his sous chef, Jeremy, to the diners:

“Jeremy has forsaken everything to achieve his goals. Like mine, his life is pressure. Pressure to put out the best food in the world. And even when all goes right and the food is perfect, and the customers are happy, and the critics are, too, there is no way to avoid the mess. The mess you make of your life, of your body, of your sanity, by giving everything you have to pleasing people you will never know.”

Boom.

Ralph Fiennes’ Chef Slowik and the automatons that work for him.

With all the brooding interiority of a stage play, The Menu mostly takes place inside the dining room of Hawthorn, Chef Slowik’s farm-to-table designer restaurant located on its own island in the Pacific Northwest, an area already known for its galling culinary pretensions. Here he plays General Custer to an army of robotic underlings who do his bidding with a dog-like obedience to authority. His authority. Every time he claps his hands, they shout, “Yes, Chef!” with unnerving promptitude. Course after course is served to the dozen diners who are able to afford the $1,250.00 “privilege.”

These are the same types of people you’d expect to see at any gallery opening, tony six-week-waiting-list restaurant, or exclusive night club: the sleazy has-been celebrity (played by John Leguizamo), his assistant/lover (Aimee Carrero), the absurdly wealthy couple that continuously buys expensive things merely to show that they can buy expensive things (Judith Light and Reed Birney), a troika of obnoxious, grifty tech bros (Arturo Castro, Mark St. Cyr, Rob Yang), the narcissistic food critic and her editor/enabler (Janet McTeer and Paul Adelstein), and then our sex worker/protagonist Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her “date” (Nicholas Hoult) who possibly incarnates the worst type of sycophant I’ve ever seen at one of these places.

Since everything we do, say, and own—or choose not to do, say, or own—becomes a sign of our status, and food culture, like art culture, thrives on exclusive access, everyone except Margot is already predisposed to think more highly of themselves than of the people who serve them. And Chef Slowik is only too aware of that, which is why, over the course of the evening, he systematically destroys his patrons’ self-assurance that wealth can insulate them from anything. They are so so wrong.

Food as metaphor in The Menu

British director Mike Mylod (who has also directed 13 episodes of Succession) is clearly at home with this kind of acerbic ensemble fare. In 2019, after one of his most memorable Succession episodes, “Tern Haven,” aired, the doorbell rang at his Brooklyn apartment, and when he went downstairs to answer it, a courier handed him an envelope. It was a note from director Steven Spielberg gushing how much he loved the episode. “Directing a dinner party is like fighting a bear,” Spielberg wrote, “and you won.”

In many respects, “Tern Haven” was a long taxi on the runway leading up to takeoff, and takeoff, for Mylod, is definitely The Menu. Even when the movie strains credulity or veers so far over the top you’re thinking, oh, come on, you’re riveted. You can’t help yourself. You actually want Chef Slowik (the name means nightingale, which bears a symbolic relationship with creativity, the muse, and nature’s purity) to light up these rich, over-privileged wankers.

Watching him forces you to reckon with those same homicidal impulses in yourself toward the Tylers of this world, fanbois who know everything there is to know about something except how to do it.

After Tyler fails spectacularly in the kitchen, Chef Slowik guts him with: “You are why the mystery has been drained from our art.”

Of the diners, only Margot, a fellow “shit shoveler,” can tell the difference between food as an abstraction, an idea, an exercise in vanity, versus food that genuinely nourishes and gives pleasure. The message here is obvious: it takes a whore to know a whore. “I am a monster,” Chef Slowik confesses. “NO, I was a monster. And a whore. But tonight, everything I’m doing is pure. Egoless. And at last, the pain is almost gone … As Dr. King says, ‘We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed’.”

And right there is the overarching theme of The Menu. When status highlights the aesthetic divisions that render society odious (e.g., why the rich go to the bother of pretending to understand abstract art, foams, and emulsions, and the lower classes find value in none of those things), and when the creative classes continue to let commerce and the upper classes determine the value of their work, we get exactly what we deserve, which is Chef Slowik and his restaurant.

By the time we get to the grand finale, which is Slowik creating a flaming human tableaux out of a “f***ing smore,” we truly see the depths of his despair and his nihilism. The smore is his final pronouncement on all of us, and yes, possibly himself.

For what is there left to create if you have nothing but disdain for the people you serve, the people you cook for, and yet without their patronage, you cease to exist?

Copyright © 2023 Stacey Eskelin

Did you see The Menu? Do you have thoughts on foodie culture? Weigh in! I want to hear from you.