We’re being bad customers. The Menu screenwriters Will Tracy and Seth Reiss and I are still not ready to order on the server’s second go-round. We’re at New York’s Huertas, a tapas restaurant in the East Village and an apt setting for a conversation about how two comedy writers got so much right about what’s wrong with food culture. The duo’s new film, The Menu—a horror-comedy taking place over the course of a tasting menu directed by Mark Mylod—spends much of its run skewering the very things food media loves to talk about: high-concept dishes, tiny overpriced portions, and diners moaning over bites of mignonette.
The Menu follows one dinner at Hawthorn, a highly exclusive restaurant located on a private island and run by the enigmatic chef Julian Slowik, played by Ralph Fiennes. Slowik is one of the world’s most famous chefs, the kind who would say his food is his art. But a career spent satisfying crowds of diners—crowds in constant search of new flavors, new textures, new…newness—has left him embittered. Only a few courses into the night, Slowik reveals his plan to kill everyone at the restaurant at the meal’s end. Trapped on the island with him and his henchmen, the guests have little choice but to eat.
It’s no secret that food workers have a unique relationship with their clientele—a dynamic you’ll understand if you’ve worked in hospitality. In my time in service, we’d joke (in great detail) about wanting to murder the rude, entitled members of the country club before putting on our widest smiles to not fuck with our tips. The chef Dominique Crenn, who consulted on the food in the film, empathizes with Slowik in her own way. “I’m not as crazy as he is, but I understand his way of thinking,” she said to me during an earlier Zoom call.
But as resentful as my fellow service staff and I were of the customer, we also needed them to survive. “It’s a symbiotic relationship,” says Reiss. “[Slowik] needs them watching, financing the operation.”
Tracy says the film was inspired by a real-life meal. At an island restaurant much like The Menu’s Hawthorn off the coast of Norway (“not Fäviken, but like Fäviken,” Tracy is quick to point out), he recalls feeling intense claustrophobia. “There’s something relentless about all of these tasting menus,” he says. “You can’t leave. You’re being held hostage by a story which they’re telling for hours.”
Still, The Menu is mostly a satire, and a successful one at that. Both Tracy and Reiss wrote for The Onion, with Tracy going on to write for HBO’s Succession and Reiss spending six years on Late Night With Seth Meyers. They say that part of what made their dynamic work on The Menu was their differing opinions on food. “I, with great shame,” Tracy says, “would definitely identify as a foodie.” He cooks at home, buys fancy appliances, and plans vacations around eating. Reiss, on the other hand, is not one, although he’s quick to acknowledge the artfulness of top-tier restaurants (“the food is good”).
Tracy points out the humor of the film probably wouldn’t work if they both drank the fine dining Kool-Aid. As its writers, they wanted to point out the ways the culture around these restaurants is both incredible and silly. “It’s the bullshit of those places and the magic,” Tracy says.
The pair is hesitant to order anything. I end up ordering for the table, eager to get back to our conversation and anxious to not aggravate the staff.
While we wait for our food, Reiss and Tracy say the chef Curtis Duffy’s Chicago restaurant Grace (now closed following a kitchen walkout) informed the kind of fine dining restaurant they’d set out to both celebrate and sear. “That, to me, was the epitome of fine dining,” says Reiss. “Everything is synchronized. Everything makes perfect sense, top to bottom.”
Another key influence was EL Ideas, a Michelin-starred Chicago spot headed by chef Phillip Foss. Apparently a fan of The Onion, Foss had asked to sit in on a pitch meeting for the satirical news website. He then allowed Reiss and Tracy into his restaurant kitchen, where they noticed similarities in the ways that ideas were pitched in writers’ rooms. “To see him really wanting to hang out and just watch other people put something together was really cool,” Reiss explains. “That’s when I saw the chef as an artist, or the chef as a collaborator.”
Shot in part by Chef’s Table’s David Gelb and prepared on set by the Michelin-starred Crenn, the film shares macro shots showing off expertly crafted dishes. We see the chefs blotting, smearing, and tweezer-ing with meticulous precision. We hear swelling cellos throughout, reminiscent of the Chef’s Table theme. Crenn was eager to take part in a film honestly interrogating the flaws of the restaurant industry. “It takes a lot of work [to be in restaurants], and it’s not just manual—it’s physical, it’s mental,” she says, citing the high rates of alcoholism and drug abuse in restaurant kitchens.
Crenn, whose restaurant Atelier Crenn is known for its $410 per person meals, served as the film’s culinary consultant and deserves a lot of credit for how accurate the food looked on screen. Ahead of filming, she tailored to the needs of the script a number of actual dishes from her restaurant, where the dishes served are famously narrative and inspired by events in the chef’s life, similar to Slowik’s ethos for Hawthorn’s $1,250 dinners. “It was very important to me to not do prop food,” she said, describing the decision to cook the meals on set herself. “And the actor is not faking the emotion,” she said. “He's literally eating something.”
The Menu also reflects on the falling stature of restaurant critics. In past films, like Jon Favreau’s Chef or Disney’s Ratatouille, they were towering figures capable of ruining cooks’ lives and closing restaurants with the stroke of a pen. But in The Menu, the critic, played by Janet McTeer, is not intimidating. She’s just one of many obnoxious diners invited to the restaurant for what becomes Slowik’s last service. There’s a gaggle of finance bros who demand substitutions and mock the staff. There’s an obnoxious foodie, photographing course after course despite knowing he’s going to die. There’s a couple of older regulars who take Slowik’s art for granted, and a washed-up actor portrayed by John Leguizamo who is desperate for special treatment.
These are the people who the film argues can afford a $1,250 meal, a strange quirk of the art—and with the high price tag, these diners bring high expectations. “I think it’s a question of entitlement,” Reiss says. “You could be a high class person who feels like they’re entitled to something, you could be a middle class person who feels like they’re entitled to something, but if your first thought is, ‘I’m very entitled to something,’ then you’re probably going to be kind of shitty.”
We’re still the only customers in the restaurant at this afternoon hour, allowing the staff some time to chat with us. I break into a sweat from a spicy shishito, somehow the only hot pepper in a plate of 10, and Reiss and Tracy share a laugh with the server as I cough from the heat. The movie they’ve written is pretty pessimistic when it comes to customer-staff relationships, but it seems like they’ve made their peace. I ask what they do to try and be good customers: “I think some customers have lost respect for the people serving them,” Tracy says, suggesting we’d be better off if we’d treat the kitchen and staff with “respect, interest, reasonable expectations.”
“The chef and the staff, they want to make the customers happy,” Reiss adds. “There's a certain human impulse to be appreciative that you’re being served.” Ignore that instinct, take the service for granted, and—well, The Menu says the rest.