I’ve wanted to write about this film for 3 years now and I finally just needed to get something down on paper.
Spoiler warning: I give the ending away to the film The Menu (2022) in the first sentence.
The Menu (2022) is a grotesque cartoon of a film that tells the story of a maniac chef who, as the epic final course of his greatest ever menu, kills his guests, staff and himself.
It is also the most profoundly truthful film about the experience of being a restaurant cook I have ever seen.
The head chef, Julian Slowik, who enjoys cult-like devotion from his brigade of cooks, is played by Ralph Fiennes. Slowik’s food is all the worst bits of 21st century, 3 star Michelin excess. He offers a bread course without any bread in it (along with socio-political justifications for doing so), his restaurant (positioned on a hard to reach island) is accessible only to millionaires, and, of course, his tasting menu features extensive autobiographical references. One dish, titled “Memory”, consists of a chicken thigh impaled with a pair of scissors. Slowik, we learn, stabbed his drunkard father in the thigh similarly when he was a boy.
Fiennes and the screenwriters both list the early Chef’s Table series (the one with Magnus Nilsson, Dan Barber et al if you remember) as an important reference point.
I’m not surprised.
As a cook who’s spent years working in exceptionally wanky fine dining restaurants, I was always going to see this film in the cinema when it came out in 2022. And I was only more excited having read the reviews. They spoke of the film’s satire of high end excess and “upstairs downstairs class warfare”, all issues I’d thought about often having spent so long making food I could never actually afford myself.
I wondered what the film might teach me about this. Maybe it would help me think of it in new and interesting ways.
The thing is, it didn’t.
I didn’t think much at all, in fact, of the “class warfare” or critiques of late capitalist excess reviewers had picked up on. But what I did feel, even though I liked the film, was saddened. And I was saddened because I saw the film more like a parable, an allegory of the very thing I hated most about being a cook.
I love cooking for people. I love cooking for my kids, my wife, and I absolutely love cooking for strangers in restaurants, particularly the fancy restaurants where it was also part of my job to serve guests and talk to them about the weird edible oyster shell I’d spent hours shaping with a real oyster shell so it looked authentic. I love it all.
And I suppose this makes it all the harder when, having had a great time with a guest in the restaurant and service is over, something changes. I remember this most clearly during my time in Stockholm, though it’s happened wherever I’ve cooked. I would enjoy a great evening with a guest, maybe a group of them. We’d share jokes while I explain the intricacies of boiling and frying quails’ feet so they are rendered edible. But then, come evening’s end, with the kitchen cleaned and my having changed from chef whites to civvies, I pass them outside the staff changing room, perhaps, or on the staircase staff and guests share to exit the building. And they just don’t quite know how to look at me. I would smile the same smile we shared an hour earlier and say good evening, but it isn’t returned. An awkward nod, perhaps, but nothing more. As though the shared experience was reserved only for a very specific time and place: the performance that kept service functioning.
And far worse than this, of course, are those guests, often seemingly pleasant people in other walks of life, who are capable of being outright rude and even abusive when dealing with service staff.
I feel The Menu is a metaphor for this distance between diner and cook, “servant” and “master”. In being revealed as murderers, the narrative positions Slowik and his team as monsters; their humanity itself stripped away. To dust off my undergrad Levinas for a moment, the narrative allegorises the mundane and everyday ethical failure of that guest who, confronted by the service worker, refuses the face of the Other1, and treats them as function. The violence of the film makes literal this refusal: you deny my humanity, then I become truly inhuman.
Where The Menu extends this allegory, and makes being set in a restaurant truly relevant over any other servant/master situation, is how this disjuncture between guest and back of house reality exists in the failing economics of the modern restaurant industry as well.
The image of someone looking at a menu and saying they could “make that at home for half as much” is so tired it’s a cliche, but it persists. You see it in reviews, on social media comments, and of course everyday conversation. The problem is, in 2025, people saying such things still think they go to restaurants to pay for food. You don’t. You barely even pay for the person’s time cooking or serving food. You pay for that same person’s time as they clean the bins at 11.45pm or the drains at 7:30am. You pay for rent. You pay for the time a cook used prepping food for a table that “no showed”.
Don’t start a drug or gambling habit if you want to lose money fast, open a restaurant. As expensive as some people think their steak is, it isn’t expensive enough. And this leads us to a double disjuncture: the guest thinks the food is expensive while it’s really much too cheap. And it’s the faceless small and local producers (who barely turn profit) and cooks and servers (who have to work more than they’re fairly being paid) who are left to square up the bill.
I need to end this by saying I’ve probably only kept cooking because the act of serving guests can be so fun and rewarding. So many times have I spent evenings serving people who see in me a full, complete being beyond the function of service, or make me feel it at least. These are people I cherish talking about imitation oyster shells with. And, without wanting to sound like a sycophant (though I absolutely am a sycophant, I’m British after all), I feel like readers of this newsletter, who have read my story and support my telling it, are such people.
It is a hard time for restaurants. Most of the restaurants I have worked in (great ones I might add) exist now only in the memories of diners and people who worked in them. Once more people see The Menu the way I see it, not as a simple satire of excess but as a parable of the hospitality worker’s frequent invisibility, the closer we might be to keeping restaurants, and the people behind them, in good health.
For a really accessible overview of Levinas and the “face of the Other” (a really interesting philosophical idea) check out this page: www.faceofother.blogspot.com
This hit home, Wil. I worked in restaurants for decades then moved into teaching people how to become professional cooks. These kids and adults had dreams that they'd own their own restaurant, make a living, and be happy. Maybe some were. In the back of my mind, I always felt like I was leading lambs to slaughter. No one wants to be reduced to a function. Great writing, and it's much appreciated that you shared this. Now, I'm going to restack this.
Beautiful piece Wil. I remember seeing The Menu in malmö with a coworker and a crowd of Swedes who were stunned into silence. We were dying, recognizing all the heavy handed metaphors as all too familiar and too fucked up not to laugh at.