The menu - again
But this time we are indeed talking about the movie. Actually, we talk about three burgers in three movies and their status as metaphors
This post contains, of course, spoilers.
Read at your risk.
Today we are talking about The Menu, the movie. Directed by Mark Mylod and written by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, it features impeccable Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy.
I was on board with the movie all throughout to the very, very end. Till I left the cinema, located in a mall, and the familiar smell of fast food hit my nostrils.
In one second, I saw the movie rewinding fats, until the moment the protagonist bites gluttonously her burger on the boat. There, in the smell of trans-fat and overused frying oils, is where my suspension of disbelief crashed into a wall.
Because you see, I also do believe that an excellent burger is most delicious than some fine dining meals, which are just a sequence of pretentious, half-assed dishes mashed up with dull ingredients and boring techniques.
Putting stuff between two slices of bread, or putting stuff atop a slice of bread is after all a gastronomic act that is probably as old as gastronomy itself.
But by large, there is a consistent majority of fine dining that is exponentially more enriching that the compound of all burgers on the planet. In terms of personal satisfaction of the customer, cultural development, and taste refinement.
Gastronomic math, you know.
In a complete parody, for instance, at Ynnyshir in Wales (UK), histrionic Chef Gareth will even serve you a tiny Wagyu A5 burger: a miniature portion of ingredients with the full McDonald’s Big Mac flavour. Because industrial food is about artificial aromas and you can, in a very elegant gesture, show that our brains can be tricked, but that we could perfectly use prime quality ingredients and have the same organoleptic result.
We gastronomers leave the cinema thinking that, like Ratatouille’s food critic memory lane, the Chef had created with the best ingredients the most perfect burger. Drawing from his memories, of course, but also leveraging on a lifetime-long career in culinary arts.
When we see Julia Child mastering the Beef Bourguignon we know she must have cooked something delicious because of her relentless training at Cordon Bleu.
Regular folks that have zero interest in food, and regular people that do not live-breathe-obsess about gastronomy, however, will leave the cinema thinking something else completely.
They leave the cinema thinking that the shit food from their memories will be superior to fine dining. That the food they have been accustomed to eating will be better than what they could find at three Michelin stars restaurants.
Grandma’s ready-made and canned soup, Mommy’s mushy overcooked risotto, and Auntie’s box cake: delicious memories.
Tone hock I say yuck, and to which they unfortunately mold their gastronomic understanding. You know, the one for which people settle for average-bad (and “popular” food, more on this in the coming weeks).
When we watch Julie (of Julie and Julia, the movie) not acing the Bourguignon after toiling like crazy in her minuscule kitchen, regular folks say whatever, she could have bought it in a store and called it a day. It would have tasted the same to them.
I know.
Mindblowing. Two different conclusions for the same movie entirely.
Because the bitter truth is, taste is created through training. It is not only cooks and waiters and sommeliers in this industry that need years of training.
Eaters need training too.
Once upon a time I too, was easily satisfied with a regular, average-to-good meal. I interpreted food in a more normal and neutral way, I didn’t have my whole life wrapped around gastronomy. But time has passed since then. There are things that I physically cannot eat anymore.
Farmed fish, for instance. I can smell it from a mile. Disgusting.
And then there are moments when I have to feed, but that is not entirely entering my brain as food.
It happens frequently whilst flying, when my proverbial poor organisational skills have the best of my intention, and I fail at bringing on board a picnic (nothing fancy: some fruits, some hard-boiled eggs, maybe some homemade biscuits).
But back to the movies.
Because hey, did you really think that the cheeseburger-as-better-food-than-fine-dining was a genius invention of The Menu?
Think again.
It was not the first time this idea of a cheeseburger as the epitome of desirable food is used in cinematography. Already in the early Thirties, J. Wellington Wimpy, one of the characters in the comic strip Popeye, created by E. C. Segar was always dreaming of cheeseburgers.
But lately, the cheeseburger has been placed in an ideological juxtaposition with fine dining.
Below is an extract of the screenplay (yes, I read screenplays, as you know already I am a UCLA screenwriting alumna, and this comes with the package) of a very lightweight movie that came out just before The Menu (one year before, to be correct).
The conversation goes between a chef and a gastronomer, and it’s not too far-fetched to imagine the writer's room of The Menu being equally inspired by it.
“- There is nothing better than a really good cheeseburger.
- Ah!
- It's not fancy, I know.
- Well, that's interesting. Why cheeseburgers?
- It's comfort food.
- Mm.
- My mom passed away when I was a little girl, and my dad was not exactly
equipped to raise me, so whenever he thought I was sad or...unhappy or had a bad day at school, we'd go for cheeseburgers. (chuckling)”
This movie is called Mix Up In The Mediterranean, and is, according to IMDB the story of “A small-town cook impersonates his big city chef twin to compete in a culinary contest and falls for the woman in charge of the event, who thinks he is the brother who is married (my edit: to a guy)”. It was written by Julie Kim and Kariné Marwood, and directed by Jonathan Wright.
The story here does not end in such an incendiary fashion as the one in The Menu, but ends with a winning burger - with truffle of course.
Because the public needs to think that the tastebuds of gastronomists, experts and jury of this imagined Escoffier culinary event would pop in awe for a cheeseburger.
But it cannot be a normal basic burger like in The Menu.
Here we are in the realm of RomCom so it HAS to be a decadent truffle burger, with truffle shaved live on stage, because this is what rich people and hedonists do.
Right?
Is this perhaps a very veiled criticism towards the category of professional gastronomers, I quite liked to look at it this way.
Giv’em some truffle or caviar or whatever rich people eat. That must be good.
There is also a third movie that uses the hamburger (in lieu of the cheeseburger) as a metaphor for the dichotomy between luxury and simple life.
Triangle of Sadness is a movie in three separate but connected acts. Written and directed by Ruben Östlund, came out in 2022 as well. “Near the beginning of Triangle of Sadness, three jars of Nutella are delivered by helicopter to the cruise ship at the whim of a (Russian fertilizer billionaire) guest; by the end, characters are whacking donkeys for sustenance, spraying Evian facial mist aerosols directly into their mouths for hydration, and sneaking pilfered pretzel” says The Ringer, setting the tone eprfectly for the epilogue of this movie.
Nutella is not the only edible that enters (and, as the movie develops, exists) the movie. And yet, it too is a humble edible, something that one can find in any supermarket and something that has entered our childhood memories.
Slashfilm says that “(The guests)unwittingly served rotten food from chefs who are likely underpaid, and as a result, they violently excrete their wicked tendencies through a chorus line of vomit”. Medium adds “the ultra rich are extreme and they deserve the worst, if only from our imaginations, given that it is evident that nothing ever touches them in real life”.
The only intact and still edible food, after the vomit galore going down the luxury yacht, is in fact a burger. If we watch carefully, we will see that the Captain, the designated receiver of said burger, solely ate the meat, leaving all fries and patties intact.
And here once again, in a movie that is also a social criticism of poor versus rich, albeit a bit more on the nose compared to The Menu, the burger is surely interpreted in two different and opposite ways by the moviegoers, depending on their, let us call it this way, gastronomic status.
Because we can, of course, talk about food.
Amidst all this philosophy, I will start to do from time to time a food dive.
Well, we are doing one, on cheeseburgers here.
I talk a lot about philosophy, semiotics, semantics, and in general, the gastronomic universe that surrounds food. I try as much as I can to avoid talking about its actors: the producers, the transformers, and the re-tellers.
I choose to write sparingly about chefs as I think we do write about these humans quite a lot, and maybe too much. I write more about the ones who tell the stories about and around the plate.
But in some cases, we need to take a close-up and gaze at the plate, and its content.
Established that gastronomy is a form of communication - at least, between the chef and the customer, what instruments do we have to interpret it?
First of all, we do have visual and experiential clues such as the temperature of the room we are hosting, the shape and comfort of the chairs, the height of the table, the number and presence of cutlery and glasses, and the shape and style of plates, and decorations.
The music.
I have still in my ears the marvellous soundtrack that was created - bespoke - for a sushi restaurant in the Greater Lisbon area.
The restaurant wanted to place itself firmly into fine dining with a Michelin star that everyone was announcing for them. Alas, they never got it and it is now unlikely they will, despite the good kitchen brigade, sometimes the issue is in management and their ambitions. So that soundtrack, eerie and perfect, will never be used in that restaurant.
And I cannot help but wonder whether this was one of their missing pieces to get into the fine dining stardom.
