Care to effuse about The Menu?
Yes. Yes I would.
The Menu is underrated because of its incredible specificity. It's gained a reputation as an "eat the rich" movie, but it's not that at all! It's about the ways that rich people literally consume people's work with blithe entitlementā after all, they're the one's paying for it, aren't they? What does it matter that they don't even remember what they ate? What's it to the cooks, who poured all that time and effort and art into it? Why should they care? They're getting paid for it, aren't they?
The Menu is specifically about the experience of creating art for a living, especially for a wealthy clientele who have no taste of their own and just want whatever's hot at the moment. It's about the soul-crushing grind of keeping the forge going long after the fire's burned out, because they're still hungry, and you've got a living to make.
And they'll never be satisfied, because the wealthy lead lives of consumption without appreciation. They will take your work that you sweated over, that took years to perfect, and they will swallow it whole without even savoring it on the way down, and then they will demand something new to amuse them, something fresh for their Instagram stories, more content to feed the machine. Eventually, it just starts to suck. You become more and more divorced from what you love about your art, and the things you make become brittle and lifeless.
(And the kicker is, can the customers even tell your work sucks? Can you tell that it sucks? Do you even care? No! Because you're burnt out and they have no taste. It's not an accident that all the best metaphors for the characters and themes in this restaurant movie have to do with eating.)
Nowhere is this more clear than in the guests' actual interactions with Chef Julian. You will notice that as much as the diners in The Menu may or may not be impressed by him, they treat him with very little respect: they flout the house rules by taking pictures of the food, they nitpick flaws in dishes they could never make themselves, and they cannot name a single thing he has ever made for them. His sole job, in their eyes, is to provide them with a status boost, something they can brag about when they get back to their friends; the actual experience is negligible.
Is that not maddening? Especially to a man like Chef Julian, who is so detail-oriented that he precisely calculated each portion size based on digestion? That fish, the one his repeat customers don't even remember eating, must have been specifically chosen, even had the dish built around it, so no other would do. Chef Julian is right when he says that these people represent the ruin of his artā why bother putting love and care into your work when it gets horked down some greedy asshole's throat just the same?
The joy of watching Ralph Fiennes' performance as Chef Julian is watching him assert his power as, essentially, the god-king of Hawthorn. The guests came to his restaurant full of their own importance: food critic, actor, repeat patron, major investor, etc. They have given him the money and influence to get where he is, and they think that means he owes them... but he is the chef. They are at the mercy of what he gives them. They will jump when he claps; they will run and hide when he tells them to; they will take what they're given and they will like it. He is the one whose work, whose vision, whose reputation Hawthorn is built on, and he spends the entire night demonstrating that he cannot be owned (and drowning at least one person who tried).
It's ironic that Hawthorn's cuisine is so specifically tied to the island the place is built onā everything local, everything grown on-site or fished out of the ocean. It allows the clientele to feel eco-friendly, aligned with and respectful of nature, when in fact they treat Chef Julian and his staff the way they treat their assistants and their escorts and the subjects of their reviews: like an oil well, to be used and drilled and extracted and exhausted until completely empty.
It's significant that this final menu is not just a Chef Julian project; it's a collaboration among everyone in the kitchen. Multiple other cooks have contributed courses, so we know he's not making them do thisā they've all been put through the same professional meat grinder, and they've all come out with their spirits and their sanity hacked to bits. Those rich assholes, through their commodification and entitlement and cruelty and disrespect, have drained the passion from this entire team... and it is so satisfying to watch them gasp and squirm and rage, only to realize that all the money and influence in the world won't save them when the thing they've been consuming decides to bite back.
TL;DR: The Menu is not about eating the rich. The rich are the ones doing the eating: of people's energy, labor, hopes, dreams, blood, sweat, and tears. The Menu is about making them choke on it.
