'The Menu' Serves Up Creative-Class Angst

Bon appétit!

Films about chefs and cooking are great, because your review can incorporate as many food puns as you want and legally no one is allowed to get mad. 

Directed by Mark Mylod, The Menu sees a group of handpicked elites become unwilling ingredients in celebrated Chef Slowik’s (Ralph Fiennes) swan song of a dish: fed up with how the wealthy have corrupted his craft, he hopes to cleanse both himself and his guests of their sins in a final culinary masterstroke. Everyone from the guests to the kitchen staff to the chef himself will die after dessert. Well, I suppose they sort of are the dessert.

Our sacrificial lambs are put on a boat and sent to Hawthorne Island, where Chef Slowik and his staff live in a cultish fashion, devoting their lives entirely to Chef Slowik and sleeping in the same room. Amongst the condemned are an old, wealthy married couple in a failing relationship who have eaten on the island many times; a douchey crew of finance bros; a washed-up actor and his assistant; an egotistical food critic; and a true foodie who worships at Chef Slowik’s altar. The one wild card is Margo (Anya Taylor-Joy), an escort hired by Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), the foodie, Hoult’s most punchable role yet.

After the one-percenters arrive on the island, the fun begins. They are locked in a swanky restaurant and tormented with increasingly sinister and preposterous menu items. An early example is the bread, which Chef Slowik introduces as the food of the poor, the peasant, the common man. The dishes are served empty. “You are not the common man.” Watching the oblivious snobs slowly realize their predicament is delicious, with Tyler never doubting Chef Slowik for a second, the food critic wondering if perhaps the whole thing is being staged for her benefit, and the indignant bros demanding their bread.

“No,” deadpans Elsa (Hong Chau), Chef Slowik’s assistant, in a moment many food service workers have no doubt dreamt of hundreds of times over. 

We come to understand that each and every guest at the restaurant is a stand-in for larger systemic problems that, in Chef Slowik’s eyes, are ruining his art. The wealthy couple can’t name a single dish of Slowik’s that they’ve eaten, despite repeated visits. The snooty food critic has shut down many an establishment with her cruel reviews. The finance bros have zero sense of connoisseurship and see the restaurant as just another status symbol.

The washed-up actor (John Leguizamo) and Tyler represent more esoteric ideas. The actor, who starred in a terrible comedy that Chef Slowik despised (he had but one day off and spent it on that!), and so becomes the artist who betrays his craft, who stops putting effort or passion into what they do and is just looking to make a dollar. Tyler, meanwhile, is the pseudointellectual, the rabid fanboy with an encyclopedic knowledge of, in this case, the fancy kitchen tools and flavor profiles, but with no original thoughts of his own. 

Margo, our audience conduit, isn’t like the others. She’s an escort, a working girl; in a private conversation with Slowik, he declares her one of them, a person like himself and like his kitchen staff. They are the givers, the service workers, and he recognizes her—they are people who are exploited for money. 

It’s very easy, given all this, to group The Menu with other class revenge fantasies. In a world of widening disparity between the ultra rich and the working poor, it’s become a robust genre, including standouts such as Knives Out, Parasite, and Ready or Not.

When comparing The Menu to its classmates, it falls a bit short. While it’s a great ride with excellent dark comedy throughout (I especially enjoyed the presentation cards of each dish that read like morbid illustrations from The Great British Bake Off), it doesn’t have much new to say about wealth. The rich in this movie function a bit like piñatas. When they suffer and get their just desserts, we say, “Yay!” 

Part of what made Parasite, by comparison, so layered and compelling was the presence of the basement dwellers, the similarly exploited and similarly poor people who found themselves in immediate, violent conflict with our heroes. It had more to say than “rich people bad.” The miseries of capitalism are complex, inspiring competition and mistrust between people who have more in common with each other than with their bosses. 

But to judge The Menu as a film about “rich vs. poor” dynamics misses what it excels at portraying:  A different kind of class angst, that of the “successful creative.” 

Though he started out flipping burgers in a small town, Chef Slowik is a bonafide star. He has more awards and accolades than he knows what to do with, enough money to live on a private island with round-the-clock staff catering (literally) to his every artistic whim. The film wavers between aligning him with his cooks as much as with his wealthy guests. Indeed, he sees himself as part of the problem, “cleansing” himself along with the others in the fiery finale. 

Perhaps the best and most explicit portrayal of Chef Slowik’s ambiguous class position is when his angel investor is murdered. The staff trusses the business magnate in angel wings and hangs him over the ocean, slowly lowering him down beneath the waves to the horror of the dinner guests and offering the silence after his disappearance as a kind of cuisine for the ears. The investor, Chef Slowik explains, had exercised a great deal of creative control over him in exchange for his fiscal support. 

Here, Chef Slowik isn’t (God forgive me) Todd Phillip’s Joker, an average joe forced into villainy by the machinations of a wicked world. He’s a temperamental artist, every bit as snobby as his fans, but without the total control extravagant wealth would provide. For all his acclaim and prestige, he still works in the service industry, at the behest of the customer. He’s not a working class hero, but a creative raging against the inescapable reality of his industry, wishing it were possible, somehow, to make things entirely on his own terms. 

I wrote about this in “The Bell,” a meditation on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, a classic film that serves as a meditation on the life of the Russian byzantine icon painter. It portrays the archetypical artist as a fragile being in a violent world. No matter how sacred the subject, no matter how great the quality, the fires of man eventually burn it all down. 

It also depicts the artist as having no choice but to participate in that violence to some degree—Rublev and his cohorts paint a gorgeous mansion interior, so light and so delicate that it sings like a bird. The owner of the mansion then has the team murdered so that they cannot replicate their feat on another mansion for someone else. A young man who makes beautiful bells that ring so splendidly is commissioned to make one for a warlord, and in the process of creating it he mercilessly berates and punishes his underlings. It comes out perfectly, and the warlord merely nods and decides not to execute the creator. 

Violence, says Andrei Rublev, is an inescapable fact of the human condition. The artist must work with and around it, incorporate it and reflect it, collaborate with it and, ultimately, watch as it ruins their craft, leaving the artist impure, tainted, and humiliated. Their compromise does not reward them with freedom nor satisfaction. It just makes them dirtier for having accepted it. 

So, what is the solution for the artist? In The Menu, it’s suicide. There is no actual way out of such an impossible conundrum. Chef Slowik removes himself from the world, declaring that the fire will cleanse both him and the sinners he’s assembled. He also forces them to wear marshmallow suits and chocolate caps. They become s’mores. It’s delightfully macabre. 

I couldn’t help but be reminded of similar debates around the film industry, with some saying Marvel and Disney (the latter owns the former) are serving up slop in a superhero cape to tasteless, hungry audiences while smaller films and creators do their best to work in the juggernaut’s shadow. Whether this is true or not, the fact that it’s such a frequent subject of discussion shows signs of a broader anxiety that The Menu taps for inspiration. 

It doesn’t do so perfectly. The presence of Margo is the movie trying to have its petit gateau and eat its sheet cake too. It does want to connect itself to the recent spate of high-quality class warfare films and treat you to the same catharsis they do, of seeing the working class outfox their supposed superiors and come out on top. 

On that front, The Menu leaves you hungry. But I’d venture to say the film was written by and for people who are more like me—creatives with relative privilege juggling corporate appetites with a desire for pure expression. Such a person occupies an awkward rung on the ladder, wherein the customer is still always right, but there is nonetheless a sense that the work ought to transcend that old adage. It’s better, more sacred work, right? Right? 

Even in success, the artist might see themselves as beholden, burdened, encumbered: by their boss, by their own audience, by themselves for betraying their vision in exchange for material comfort. Such a person, as you might have noticed, is entirely capable of being insufferable and egocentric, elevating their work above the work of mere laborers, imagining that their suffering has greater significance, that it’s a more rarefied and perhaps even elegant thing. 

Is it the most sympathetic plight? No. But I enjoyed the specificity in The Menu. For me, it really hit the spot.