What's on The Menu? A New Film Leaves the One Percent Well Done
The bucket-list restaurant where most of the action in the new satirical film The Menu takes place is fictional; so is its chef. But if you’ve given even the slightest attention to the world of fine dining over the last decade, you know Hawthorn and you know Julian Slowik.
The Menu tells the story of what happens to a group of gastronomes who have made the pilgrimage to eat a meal in the hands of Slowik and his brigade. The chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, doesn’t just cook food; he tells stories. And by the sound of things, people the world over would jump at the chance to make the same arduous journey to this remote island, and to pay the $1,200 dinner tab for the privilege—if only they could get a reservation.
But these diners are different. The archetypes of entitlement who have assembled at Hawthorn for this evening’s fateful service range from the angel investor who makes Slowik’s project possible to the veteran critic on which the chef’s self-worth depends. The latter gloats that she received a personal invitation from the chef via text. She does this more than once.
That the film’s screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will Tracy would be attracted to this milieu is not exactly a surprise. The pair met years ago while working at The Onion. Tracy is now a writer and producer of Succession, while Reiss is a longtime member of the writing team at Late Night with Seth Meyers.
“We were both intrigued by this type of restaurant at this moment in culinary history,” says Tracy. “It’s somewhat falling out of fashion—the scary, white, usually male chef. And Slowik knows that a bit. There’s an anxiety about it all coming to an end: What I am doing has to mean something more than just pleasing these people I can’t stand.”
And how, exactly, does Slowik plan to make his mark?
Let’s just say that if all goes as planned with his new menu, it’ll be everyone’s last supper. Think of the movie as Chef’s Table meets The Most Dangerous Game; an exploration of ego, class, and the hot air that can occasionally envelop you at some of today’s most rarefied dining destinations that grows more morbid and delightfully absurd with every course that leaves Slowik’s pass.
“It’s in some ways a love letter to this type of restaurant when it’s done well, but also about all the bullshit,” Tracy says. He gives an example: in one soliloquy, Slowik quotes Martin Luther King, Jr without the slightest hint of irony. “It’s also,” Tracy adds, “about what happens when this art comes at the expense of the people [behind Slowik] who make it possible—that punishing, pressurized, scary existence.”
To ensure verisimilitude, the filmmakers enlisted Dominique Crenn, a three-Michelin-starred chef-storyteller, as a consulting producer. (Reiss and Tracy are careful to point out that she has a much more enlightened approach than Slowik). “When she was on set, she would watch with us in the video village like a hawk, pointing out what wasn’t right,” Reiss says. He adds that Crenn wasn’t interested in making Fiennes a skilled cook. She needed to get him to understand how to act like a Chef: “Dominique focused on posture, the way he flowed through the space…when to push, when to nurture.”
“When you walk,” Crenn remembers telling Fiennes, “you don’t yell, you don’t throw things. You just carry yourself so that everyone knows your eyes are everywhere.” When asked why she was drawn to the script, the chef says that the film is an uncommon and meaningful examination of the “humanity” of those who work in the back of the house.
“People need to understand,” Crenn says, “why so many in my industry explode."
The Menu is in theaters nationwide starting November 18.
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