I'm excited to watch The Menu for it's over the top ridiculousness. Approx a million years ago I had an internship in the pastry kitchen at Rouge Tomate (I'm a dietitian and they had a kind of weird fine dining combined with health food thing going on with dietitians on staff) and just that 6 weeks with all the classic angry yelling chefs screaming at everyone made me hate fine dining forever. I was mostly tasked with weighing perfect 30g balls of cookie dough and cutting fennel bulbs into perfectly even centimeter cubes so that two of them could be placed on a dessert plate(the scraps were composted).
Anyway, sorry for this essay, but I am excited to watch any kind of take down of fine dining.
Perfect timing - we watched The Menu last (Sunday) night, having read no reviews or talked with anyone who saw it but thought, based on the few sentences from HBO, ‘this could be Interesting...
And it was! Just as you say, rip-roaringly funny with some great performances (all of them, really, but the Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult ‘couple’ were perfect, and Hong Chau’s icy cold unflappability had us in tears).
Just watched this movie last night and it was so much funnier than I could have imagined. The obsession with the paco jet nearly killed me. My husband has no idea about food stuff so i was like it's just a stupid fancy ice cream machine!!
After the movie I had a cheeseburger craving of course so I made mushroom, walnut, black bean burgers, homemade buns and your oven fries recipe tonight. And then I made s'mores for dessert. Lol.
I watched it in a mostly deserted theater with a chef friend, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. The other night, one of the hosts at the restaurant where I work was talking about it, and she also enjoyed it, especially the tortilla scene. I personally found myself identifying unfavorably with the Nicholas Hoult character, though I hope that I would have attempted an omelette were I placed in his position.
Love this piece Alicia! Very much agree with your proposed assessment of why people might enjoy The Menu so much. I enjoyed it as an absurdist sendup of a certain brand of bullshit food culture and thought it was truly funny.
Also, my first movie of 2023 (in a hotel room on my honeymoon) was Burnt, which I guess recently hit Netflix. I found it...not good! You/anyone else?
I'm excited to watch The Menu for it's over the top ridiculousness. Approx a million years ago I had an internship in the pastry kitchen at Rouge Tomate (I'm a dietitian and they had a kind of weird fine dining combined with health food thing going on with dietitians on staff) and just that 6 weeks with all the classic angry yelling chefs screaming at everyone made me hate fine dining forever. I was mostly tasked with weighing perfect 30g balls of cookie dough and cutting fennel bulbs into perfectly even centimeter cubes so that two of them could be placed on a dessert plate(the scraps were composted).
Anyway, sorry for this essay, but I am excited to watch any kind of take down of fine dining.
Perfect timing - we watched The Menu last (Sunday) night, having read no reviews or talked with anyone who saw it but thought, based on the few sentences from HBO, ‘this could be Interesting...
And it was! Just as you say, rip-roaringly funny with some great performances (all of them, really, but the Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult ‘couple’ were perfect, and Hong Chau’s icy cold unflappability had us in tears).
Now we simply have to see the others you list lol
Dinner Rush w Danny Aiello
Just watched this movie last night and it was so much funnier than I could have imagined. The obsession with the paco jet nearly killed me. My husband has no idea about food stuff so i was like it's just a stupid fancy ice cream machine!!
After the movie I had a cheeseburger craving of course so I made mushroom, walnut, black bean burgers, homemade buns and your oven fries recipe tonight. And then I made s'mores for dessert. Lol.
I watched it in a mostly deserted theater with a chef friend, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. The other night, one of the hosts at the restaurant where I work was talking about it, and she also enjoyed it, especially the tortilla scene. I personally found myself identifying unfavorably with the Nicholas Hoult character, though I hope that I would have attempted an omelette were I placed in his position.
Love this piece Alicia! Very much agree with your proposed assessment of why people might enjoy The Menu so much. I enjoyed it as an absurdist sendup of a certain brand of bullshit food culture and thought it was truly funny.
Also, my first movie of 2023 (in a hotel room on my honeymoon) was Burnt, which I guess recently hit Netflix. I found it...not good! You/anyone else?