"The Menu" Is As Good As Any American Film I Saw in 2022. Why Isn't It Making More Of A Splash?

Maybe because it's being judged by a horror-movie standard it was never intended to meet.

“God! The restaurants!” a character pronounces at the start of John Guare’s wickedly funny 1990 comedy of manners, Six Degrees of Separation. “New York has become the Florence of the 16th century. Genius on every corner.” The Menu, which is as good as or better than any American film I saw in 2022, takes that sentiment and makes a meal of it.

There were two major American films last year—two that I saw, anyway—about the pitiless tyranny of art. The one everyone seems to love is Tár, which, except at the very end, was not a comedy. I was not a fan (see “Tár Baby”), because the film wanted to have it every conceivable way.

The Menu takes the tyranny of art as seriously as Tár but satirizes it in deliciously deadpan style. The restaurant, Hawthorn, is situated on an otherwise-deserted island. Its smokehouse, the maître d'hôtel explains to the guests, “is in the Nordic style. We use dairy cow meat only, which we age for an astonishing 152 days to relax the protein strands.” An amuse-bouche is introduced as “a compressed and pickled cucumber melon, milk snow, and charred lace.” The first course is paired with “a premier cru Chablis from 2014. Not just single vineyard but a single row of vines.” The bread course is without bread, just the accompaniments and a note that says: “The bread you will not be eating tonight was made from a heritage wheat called red fife, crafted with our partners at the Tehachapi Grain Project, devoted to preserving heirloom grains.” We’ve heard real high-end restaurateurs talk this way. Now we’re invited to find it funny. It’s okay, you can laugh.

The Menu received respectful but not enthusiastic reviews. At first I thought perhaps this was because gastronomes have managed so thoroughly to convince themselves that they’re saving the world that they’ve lost their sense of humor. (In fact, only José Andrés is saving the world.) But it turns out the foodies have embraced the film much more enthusiastically than the broader culture. Here’s Serena Dao in Bon Appetit:

[B]ecause the movie is based on the very real restaurant world, it becomes more delightful. Its realism is perhaps a testament to Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn’s consultation on the film. Yes, restaurants actually exist on islands where all the ingredients supposedly came from the island itself. (Willow Inn’s everything-made-on-premises ethos, of course, turned out to be questionable; an investigation found that the restaurant allegedly used ingredients from sources like Costco.) It is indeed common for servers at the fanciest of restaurants to learn your personal history such as occupation or pets before you show up. The practice even has a ridiculous name: “dreamweaving.” One course looked so similar to a visually iconic dish at a real-life fine dining restaurant that I almost burst out laughing.

Maybe the problem is that the film was marketed as a horror film when it’s really a comedy of manners that gradually turns surreal. I’m not a horror fan but I gather the genre has matured in recent years, setting a high bar that The Menu doesn’t meet. It doesn’t meet it because it isn’t trying to. It isn’t trying to because The Menu isn’t a horror film. It’s a finely calibrated burlesque. There’s violence, to be sure, but the violence isn’t shocking because apart from the heroine, Margot Mills (Anya Taylor-Joy), and the villain, Julian Slowik, whom everyone addresses as “Chef,” everybody’s a (deftly-drawn) caricature. Ralph Fiennes, in a characteristically superb performance, invites the audience to identify with Chef’s culinary genius and feel his torment. Chef wants to be appreciated—don’t we all?—but instead casts his pearl before swine feeding rich boobs. Every star chef at an out-of-sight “fine dining” establishment must chafe at this reality. You want to sell quality and you end up selling status instead. Even after he starts killing people, Chef feels much more real to me than Lydia Tár.

We live in a golden age of food, and it’s a marvelous foodie renaissance, and it’s also kind of appalling. The Menu doesn’t have to stretch reality very far to portray the upper reaches of such connoisseurship as a cult, because it is. Perhaps the point strikes you as obvious. I found it delicious, and very much vaut le voyage.