Review: 'The Menu' is unpredictable and delectably unhinged from 1st scene to last
The film offers a cornucopia of pleasures.
In this delicious satire of the foodie crowd, a hot couple (Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult) travels by yacht to remote Hawthorne Island to eat at an exclusive, farm-to-table restaurant where the chef (Ralph Fiennes in full deadpan dazzle) prepares a lavish menu with surprises that are equal parts hilarious and horrifying. No worries. You’ll laugh till it hurts.
Now in theaters, “The Menu” offers a cornucopia of pleasures, starting with director Mike Mylod, who’s staged 13 episodes of TV’s best series, “Succession,” and spices the script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy with enough merry and menacing courses to make you hungry for more.
Fiennes has a blast as Chef Julian Slowik. He’s like the host of a reality cooking show with a barely disguised contempt for customers who willingly pay $1,250 a head to sample his pretentious dishes. Wait till you try the “breadless bread plate.”
Hoult plays Tyler, a chef groupie who ignores his cool-girl date, Margot (Taylor-Joy), to focus on the food chef has prepared for a select 12 dinner guests. Raves Tyler: “I’ve watched him plate a raw scallop during its last dying contraction of muscle.” Yikes!
Margot, a last-minute invitee, makes a perfect audience surrogate. We share her eye-rolling at Trent when he swoons over the mouthfeel of a mignonette. When she warns him to never say “mouthfeel again,” you want to applaud.
The same goes for the dark look she shoots at a snobby sommelier who describes hyper decanting a 2013 Pinot Noir to awaken it from its slumber with notes of cherry, tobacco and—get this—“a faint sense of loneliness and regret.”
Too much? Maybe. But the food world deserves the comic skewering it gets, not just the elitist one-percenters who define quality by what they’re charged for it but the celebrity chefs who willingly turn cooking into theater of the absurd.
Chef gets unwavering support from his culinary staff, especially Elsa (a dynamite Hong Chau) as the right hand who wrangles customers who believe they’re free to leave the island. Ha!
There’s Diego Garcia (John Leguizamo), a fading action star who’s stooping to do a travel show and his assistant Felicity (Aimee Carrero) who’s had it with this jerk’s unchecked narcissism.
Janet McTeer is caustic perfection as Lillian Bloom, the Saveur food critic who put Chef on the map to the delight of her publisher (Paul Adelstein). And Arturo Castro, Rob Yang and Mark St. Cyr distill everything you hate about finance guys whose culinary taste stopped at S’mores.
The great Reed Birney oozes superiority as an aging tycoon who bristles when his wife (the ever-incomparable Judith Light) insists that Margot is a dead ringer for their daughter.
Margot has secrets. So does everyone in this restaurant from hell. Fiennes and Taylor-Joy are plain irresistible. She plays cheeseburger and fries to his raw oyster with lemon caviar. In the end, when there’s blood on the walls (I’ll never tell), they negotiate a bizarro peace.
“The Menu” stays unpredictable and delectably unhinged from first scene to last. Mylod serves up a mix of ingredients that some may find hard to digest. C’mon. With this dream cast, you can’t go wrong even when the script goes off the rails. Chef says it best: Enjoy!
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