The high mass in the gastronomic cathedral has begun with the hermeticallyclosing of the thick wooden door. “Welcome to Hawthorne,” says chief JulianSlowik (a creepy Ralph Fiennes – you also know him as Voldemort) in _The Menu_with an affable smile to his guests. They have just been taken by boat to hisworld-famous restaurant on a deserted island.
That menu starts with a dish of melting saltwater ice and shellfish that haveemerged from the sea before the eyes of the highly honored public, laid downon decorative stones by an upright army of chefs with pincer precision. Theinsufferably haughty restaurant critic – one of the twelve lucky ones who canshare in this ultimate gastronomic total experience – naughty pricks a waterplant on her fork. ‘This chef’, she teaches her fawning table companion,’tells a story. I call it… biomic. We are surrounded by and part of it_ecosystem_ from which we are fed . We eat literal the ocean.’
Aftertaste of longing and regret
The same restaurant critic starts to chuckle nervously when she sees thisscene in the cinema, because she may have accidentally said something sosignificant about leaves on a stone. In fact: all the remarkable statementsand incidents in the first part of The Menu (before the great humiliation,mutilation, and murder begins) are not news to people who have ever settledinto the walnut seats of restaurants like Noma, Fäviken, or Lighthouse Island,or studied their expensive cookbooks or glossy Instagram pages.
Restaurant Hawthorne embodies the most influential culinary movement of the21st century so far: Scandinavian, rugged chic, endlessly in love with local,small-scale produced or home-picked and fermented seasonal products. Theextensive tour of the company, the so-called storytelling who has to loadthe food with all kinds of extra meaning – it is warp and weft.
For example, Hawthorne, where a place setting costs $ 1,250, serves a loafwithout bread to draw attention to hunger and poverty in the world. Thecheerful sommelier serves a biodynamic cabernet frank , ‘from our friendsfrom the Loire, with beautiful smoky and cherry notes and a subtle aftertasteof longing and regret.’ Everything looks frighteningly familiar – and yet itis also immediately clear that something is very wrong.
Netflix series ‘Chef’s Table’.
Take for what follows the sectarian horror of Midsommar and cook it overhigh heat with the slick food porn of the Netflix series Chef ‘s Table._David Gelb, who _Chef ‘s Table made, worked on The Menu , just like theFrench three-star chef Dominique Crenn, who designed the dishes. All this wasthen poured over with a greasy, spicy sauce of social satire in which aspoiled urban upper class (like Marie Antoinette in her rustic _fake_farmhouse with perfumed sheep) likes to lay down a fortune to feel closer tonature, craftsmanship and a romanticized image of ‘the common man’ again – andeventually has to pay for that decadence with her head.
It is striking how dark and hopeless the restaurant films and series that havebeen released in the past year are. As if the hospitality industry, awakenedfrom its years of covid coma, has lost something essential in innocence andfun.
Insufferable restaurant critic
In Boiling Point we witness the cloister of Andy Jones, chef of a restaurantin London. In the film, all the problems that will currently sound familiar tomany catering entrepreneurs pile up in one hellish evening: staff shortages,major money worries due to rising prices, an insufferable haughty restaurantcritic (have you got her again), then the inspector of the food – andcommodity authority, and a forgotten nut allergy. Boiling Point is also shotin one feverish take, leaving no room for Andy (played very convincingly byStephen Graham) to take a break or think about why he’s doing all this, andhow he’s ever going to dig his way out of this hole again.
Series ‘The Bear’.
In the great restaurant series The Bear about a young star chef who inheritsa family business in Chicago, the same stuffiness and raw hopelessnessdominates – although that series does have a happy ending.
Feature films and documentaries about the restaurant business and chefs overthe past fifteen years have been consistently positive, joyful and romantic,full of delicious, hungry images and wise lessons about the values of fairtrade and authenticity. In movies like Chief with John Favreau (2014) and_burnt_ with Bradley Cooper (2015) and also The Ramen Girl (2008) and NoReservations (2007) the heroes may have had rough edges and bumps in theirstormy lives, but deep down they were sweet, fine, sincere people. As areward, they all found business and creative success and new love between thepans at the end of their film.
Tantrums
In documentaries like Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011 ), El Bulli: Cooking inProgress (2010), Sergio Herman: Fucking Perfect (2015) and Noma, MyPerfect Storm (2015) we saw how hard and perfectionistic real chefs could beon themselves and their environment, but what counted most was their genius,the high culinary art they produced – the tantrums here and there seemed to bemainly in service of that, as a sign of how terribly important it all was.
Noma Documentary ‘My Perfect Storm’ (2015).
And then there’s the aforementioned _Chef ‘s Table_in which adversity in thelives of chefs is mainly presented as a background against which even better,even more photogenic dishes can be made, which can then be filmed in slowmotion with swelling music.
decadence of the nineties
It was especially after the financial crisis of 2008 that the chef was hoistedup as the bony folk hero, the honest, passionate anti-banker, who really madesomething with his big, fireproof hands (the Amsterdam star chef Ron Blaauwwalked around in the advertisements for ING at the time). Moreover, thedecadence of the 1990s and alienating ‘molecular cuisine’ of the early 2000shad given way to something more local, something more genuine, something lesselitist that also had political and sustainable ambitions, and at the sametime the public could not get enough of watching chefs – both in open kitchensand on television. Like the bigoted Tyler in The Menu says, “People idealizeathletes and pop stars, but chefs play with the raw material of life and deathitself.” To what kind of nightmare that game can lead, he will experiencepersonally later.
‘Pig’ (2021).
In the movie Pig (2021) widower and disappointed top chef Robin Feld (asubdued Nicholas Cage, unrecognizable by his huge beard and face beaten to apulp twice in the film) has retreated to the forest as a hermit. When histruffle pig is stolen, he returns to the Boston restaurant world for the firsttime in fifteen years. What is striking is that there, all sorts of new talkabout deconstructed scallops and dishes with names like ‘ _milk – smoke – den_Unfortunately, nothing has really changed at all.
The restaurants are still in the hands of big money; chefs and restaurateurscontinue to be flogged, used and squeezed by investors, landlords and theculinary press, and in turn do the same to their own staff. The food industryis still dirty business as usual, where only the hype and the outside countand real taste and creativity is usually suppressed. And those cute beardedand tattooed food hipsters from 2010? Once grown up, they turn out to havebecome just as capitalist bastards as their gastronomic fathers.
Wild picking
In these new films, restaurant food is primarily a vehicle for power,pretensions and class differences, the restaurant the war zone in which bossesand servants, givers and takers, possessors and non-haves fight, oppress andtease each other. Especially against the barren background of the world as itis today – with climate change, financial uncertainty and the constant threatof war and political unrest – the movie restaurant is no longer a romantic,self-sustaining ecosystem.
It is either, at best, barely averted chaos, or the type of sectarian orderthat, in the wrong hands, can develop into a death cult. And then the naive_foodies_ who still imagine that with very expensive luxury restaurants andforaging, they could change the food system and inherent wickedness of humanbeings? Chief Slovik says, “What’s happening in here is meaningless comparedto what’s happening outside.”
‘The Menu’ (2022).
It is striking that the only bright spot, the only possibility for a kind ofredemption, in these films always turns out to be with the food. A perfectcheeseburger, a simple mushroom pie, an egg baked by a child, theunforgettable, rustic dish you ate on that special night with your loved one.Restaurant life may be a cynical hell and the boss a dangerous lunatic, butthere remains an unwavering faith in the possibility of real, honest,uncorrupted, simple food and cooking as something essential, as a way out –just like the style ridiculed in these films. made after 2008 was seen as asolution to what was then considered decadent. And so we eat.
‘Oh what precious ,” says the restaurant critic The Menu , who does notyet know what all-scorching grand dessert will soon hang over her head. ‘Youalso taste that little note of goatiness in this dish? A tiny bit of goat –right at the end?’
The reviewer in the room bursts out laughing – with a knot in her stomach.