If you’re someone who considers themselves a foodie (and I am), there has likely been a moment in the past few years when you had The Awakening. Perhaps that was when the waiter was layering veal marrow in a whipped foam served with a small New Zealand lettuce. It may have happened when you were eating red snapper that had been cooked halfway through, like a rare steak, and thought, “I like sushi, I like cooked fish, but I’m not sure this is It really is the best of both worlds.” That was probably when I saw the bill.
Whatever the motive, that was the moment you looked off your plate and realized that fine foodie culture had become a serious nuisance. It has become too difficult, too expensive, too full of himself. Not Filling (from yourself), very avant-garde and conceptual, so connected to The Salvation of the Planet, a lot of misfortune. Did I mention very pricey? It used to be that if you wanted to make fun of your culinary mania, you made fun of someone like Guy Fieri. But he rose from the ashes of shame to a kind of born-again respect (and yes, “Diners, Drive Ins & Daes” has always been a great show). Now, if you want to mock your culinary mania, the more natural targets are restaurants like The French Laundry in Napa Valley or Bros’ in southern Italy, where a 12-course “tasting menu” can inspire you to think, as one blogger put it: There was nothing close to the actual meal being served.”
This is the “foodie culture” that takes skewers, slices and cubes them with shocking, exciting enthusiasm. Most are located within the metal confines of a lavish designer restaurant, a gourmet temple called Hawthorne that’s private enough to be on its own island – Hawthorne Island, a 12-acre farm-to-table destination where the rich, famous, and student live, pays $1,250 Head over to sample the ever-changing tasting menu assembled by Chef Sloic (Ralph Fiennes). A strict master of the kitchen, he’s simultaneously a self-taught artist, a training sergeant in his army of chefs (who only work behind customers in an open kitchen), and a foodie cult leader, delivering each course with a resounding hand of applause and a monologue explaining its importance. “Don’t eat,” he tells diners. “The taste.” But the urge to taste without eating is a form of narcissism for chefs. He is such a legend in his mind that he has forgotten what food is.
“The Menu” is a black comedy, but one of them is shown close to the bone. and here he is A thriller, because after a while what is presented to the pioneers turns from pretense to danger. Even danger becomes a form of arrogance: This is how important food is. However, the delicious joke on “The Menu” is that the food doesn’t matter at all. Food is an abstraction, and ideaall created to realize some ideas that transcend the limits of perfection and have nothing to do with sustenance or pleasure and everything related to the vanity of those who make food and those who consume it.
The latter, in this case, is a group of dinner victims riddled with theatrical flaws like the characters in “Knives Out.” That’s why knives were taken out for them. They get what they deserve just to come to this restaurant, and to buy their dream that this is the meal they have earned, because that is how cool, thriving and elite they are.
A devoted foodie, Tyler (Nichols Hoult) knows he will love whatever is served. He brought on a date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who wasn’t even close – in fact, turned into a cynical audience actress, the average person who sees through all the bulge on display. Lillian (Janet McTeer), a food critic, takes pride in writing the kinds of reviews that shut down restaurants, so we know she’ll only get them from deserts. There are also three tech brothers (Arturo Castro, Rob Yang, and Paul Adelstein) who, among the three of them, embody every flavor of the hateful. And there’s a lovable but faded movie star, played by John Leguizamo, along with his assistant (Amy Carrero), who uses dinner as an excuse to break up with him.
The ‘menu’ is divided into courses, with each dish, and its ingredients, listed on display, and for a while the movie is content to make fun of the food. The first dish has foam (a hint that it won’t melt in your mouth as much as it evaporates before you can enjoy it). This is the simple dish. Each next represents more and more the decomposition of food as we know it. Chef Sloek is a mad scientist in culinary art who has reduced the essence of cooking into a glorious laboratory experience. The diners are his guinea pigs, which may be why he hardly despise them. As it turns out, the menu he masterminded has been meticulously arranged All them for their fair deserts, as if this were a Michelin star version of “Saw”.
The director, Mark Millaud, is a British veteran of television who took a sinister cut (he directed 13 episodes of “Succession”) and shows it here. His theater is sharp, elegant and cool at best. And the script, written by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy (veterans of Seth Meyers, John Oliver, and the “Onion” TV series), never stops buzzing with observation, even as it transforms into a superworld, full of blood, that turns the movie into a copy. Zigzag from the theater of the absurd.
The cast are all fun, but the main cast (sorry, I can’t resist) are so good they’re delicious. Ralph Fiennes plays an art chef from Hell as an arrogant fascist fascist, as if his mission – to make food worth tasting but somewhat too big to eat – was glorifying and tormenting him at the same time. And Anya Taylor-Joy, as the customer who got his number, cuts through it all with an increasingly disdainful glamor as she lays out the big picture of what’s going on: that decadent aristocracy superiority All this is the point. The grand finale is pretty funny, as Chef Sloek breaks down the best junk food – the fat, “damn savage” that will clean everything up with its fire. The Menu says that the problem with what haute cuisine has evolved into is that it has grown far from minimal, leaving nothing in between. No matter how divine the food is, you end up hungry.
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