The elaborately prepared feast at uber-exclusive restaurant Hawthorne, the setting of the new gourmand-culture thriller The Menu, is so photogenic that snapping pictures has been expressly forbidden; food in general, however, doesn’t come off looking so good.
The dishes whipped up by self-serious celebrity chef Julian (Ralph Fiennes) and his militaristic fleet of obedient kitchen staff aspire to profundity rather than settling for the merely appetizing. As foodie douche Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) mansplains to his unimpressed date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), the sequencing of courses tells a story, elevating foodstuffs to the level of an artistic medium. She’s mostly just hungry, and so she’s disappointed when each plate bears a couple of bites’ worth of what she can only assume is edible material.
A couple of tables over, a catty food critic and her editor concur that one culinary creation intricately bedecked with sprigs and leaves has been “tweezed to fuck”, a handy encapsulation of the film’s take on haute cuisine as fussy and overly mannered. As the moral fissures in the evening’s collection of one-percenters open up to reveal their deplorable depths, the hoity-toity grub turns into a marker of their personality defects – deluded privilege, cooked to perfection.
Director Mark Mylod and writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy resort to some cheap shots in their takedown of gustatory pretension (it’s 2022 and we’re still making “molecular gastronomy looks weird” jokes), but they’re working from a dog-eared recipe. The movies have long cultivated a distrustful relationship to the concept of fancy food, using upscale dining as a shorthand for the sanitized savagery of the bourgeoisie. The tongue’s sense of taste stands in for the brain’s, inviting damning statements about creativity, money and consumption that often short-change the joys and virtues of a nice meal. It’s all made out to be one big con, a hustle in which poseur saps spend out…