The Menu, directed by Mark Mylod and starring Ralph Fiennes, follows a group of diners who experience a top chef’s outrageous final meal. In its more direct moments, it serves as a blunt, class-based satire. But in other moments, it seems to invite further analysis, indicating subtleties and deeper meanings to the action. This piece will explain those meanings and tie the film together.
To summarize the analysis to follow, Chef Julian Slowik’s menu is a piece of performance art that commemorates his own artistic corruption at the hands of a materialistic society. Each dish represents an aspect of his decline. And each diner in the film represents an aspect of the societal pressure that has ruined him.
To demonstrate this, I’ll go through the menu course by course. Along the way, I’ll explain how each dish contributes to the overall meaning described above.
First Course: The Island
The first course to be served, “The Island,” pays tribute to nature. It consists only of plants and rocks from the environment. Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) introduces the dish by praising natural harmony and criticizing human attempts to improve upon it.
Viewers may soon forget this speech, since the shock value of “The Island” pales in comparison to that of later courses. But it’s a pivotal moment, since, as we’ll see, the later courses will expand upon Slowik’s negative view of society. Therefore, starting the menu with a tribute to uncorrupted nature lays the foundation for what’s to come. Think of it as representing a “pre-downfall” state akin to the Garden of Eden.
Second Course: Breadless Bread Plate
Slowik’s cataloging of his downfall begins with his second course, “Breadless Bread Plate.” He introduces the dish with a speech hailing bread as the “food of the common man.” But he quickly points out that, due to their wealth, the diners before him aren’t the common man. He therefore denies them bread and serves only the accompaniments.
The function of “Breadless Bread Plate,” then, is to bring attention to the elitism of the diners. And Slowik’s assertion that the guests aren’t regular people is proven correct by their bizarre reactions to the dish.
For example, hotshot bankers Bryce, Soren, and Dave threaten to have the restaurant closed if the server continues to refuse them bread. Wealthy couple Richard and Anne Leibrandt show only mild bafflement. Elitist food critic Lilian Bloom calls Slowik’s idea “fiendish” but becomes preoccupied with a split emulsion in the accompaniment tray. Actor George Diaz largely ignores the dish and discusses his intention to pitch a bogus show in which he’ll travel the world and pretend to enjoy food. Culinary enthusiast Tyler (Nicholous Hoult) is the most admiring: he gushes about Slowik’s inventiveness and “badassery.”
These reactions demonstrate various ways of spoiling the restaurant experience:
- The bankers: entitlement. They have no interest in food and only want to boss the staff and chef around. When they become even slightly dissatisfied, they wield their financial influence to threaten harm.
- The Leibrandts: indifference. They’re simply passing the time and have no enthusiasm for or engagement with the meal.
- Lilian and her editor: snobbery. They’re preoccupied with trivial details and have lost the ability to enjoy food rather than use it to demean others or show off.
- George: exploitation. He sees food only as a means of attaining fame and fortune.
- Tyler: infatuation. He’s obsessed with fine dining and with Chef Slowik in particular—so much so that he neglects basic human decency and even his own personal safety.
Again, these corruptions of the chef-customer relationship are characteristic of rich, elite diners. And given that Hawthorn serves such customers daily, their distorted approaches to food have the potential to influence the chefs and staff. In fact, considering Hawthorn’s isolation and exclusive contact with upper class guests, it wouldn’t be surprising if Slowik and his employees began to absorb and reflect some of those damaging attitudes and traits.
Thus, if “The Island” presented uncorrupted innocence, “Breadless Bread Plate” gestures toward a potentially corrupting influence: the materialistic upper class.
Of relevance, there’s a well-studied psychological principle that describes how subjects behave differently under observation. The name of this principle: the Hawthorne effect.
Third Course: Memory
In the third and fourth courses, Slowik changes direction somewhat. Instead of continuing to focus on the potentially corrupting influence of high society, as in “Breadless Bread Plate,” he turns his lens inward. These next two courses examine why an artist like himself might be vulnerable to debasement by the outsized demands of Hawthorn’s patrons.
The third course, “Memory,” begins this introspection. It starts with Slowik telling a harrowing childhood story of stabbing his drunken father in the thigh to protect his mother. Memorializing this traumatic event, the dish features chicken thigh stabbed with scissors.
Slowik’s story serves to illuminate how our pasts may ingrain self-destructive tendencies that manifest throughout our lives. Apparently, Slowik grew up in a confusing, stressful environment. He was often caught between two sides, pressured to act as mediator or even savior. It’s no surprise, then, that he remains inclined to please people, no matter the validity of their demands. His childhood traumas have instilled in him a compulsion to meet others’ wants. This compulsion may have pushed him toward becoming a chef in the first place—and it leaves him susceptible to the abuse of difficult guests.
Fourth Course: The Mess
The theme of feeling compelled to please others also underlines the menu’s fourth course, “The Mess.” This course involves a sous-chef, Jeremy Louden, committing suicide in front of the guests.
As usual, the key to understanding the meaning of the dish lies in the introductory speech. In it, Slowik notes that Jeremy, like himself, has “forsaken everything” for the art of cooking and lives a miserable life of “pressure”:
Even when all goes right, and the food is perfect, and the customers are happy, and the critics are, too—there is no way to avoid the mess. The mess you make of your life, of your body, of your sanity, by giving everything you have to pleasing people you will never know.
Recall that “Memory” highlighted how childhood traumas can help make an artist vulnerable to corrupting influences. Similarly, “The Mess” highlights how the very nature of service work makes one vulnerable by exacting a crushing toll on the body and mind. Giving “everything you have” to strangers inherently degrades and makes a “mess” of the server, Slowik asserts. And this degradation, we can infer, may also weaken one’s defenses against ugly, base attitudes like those of Hawthorn’s rich clientele—that is, if it doesn’t drive one to suicide, as it does Jeremy.
Palate Cleanser
Slowik then takes a break from his menu to explicitly criticize various guests. And his comments reiterate the natures of their warped relationships with food described in the second section of this piece. For instance, he accuses Lilian Bloom of destroying lives with her snobbish reviews, and he takes the Leibrandts to task for failing to even remember their previous meals at Hawthorn.
More importantly, though, Slowik also admits to making a major error in running his restaurant. Specifically, he acknowledges that by letting his food become too expensive for average people, he has doomed himself to trying to satisfy “people who could never be satisfied.” And he remarks that his mother may have first instilled in him this impulse to please the un-pleasable. All of these statements confirm and summarize parts of our analysis thus far.
Finally, Slowik indicates yet another corrupting influence on him and his art. He notes that Doug Verrick, his “angel investor,” insisted on meddling with his menu during the COVID pandemic to optimize profits. Slowik therefore drowns Verrick in front of the diners to reclaim his artistic freedom.
A “palate cleanser,” so to speak. And another example of Slowik’s obsession with how becoming dependent on wealthy patrons has damaged his art.
Fifth Course: Man’s Folly
To recap: the first four courses focused on the mechanics of Slowik’s artistic decline. First, “The Island” established a baseline of untouched innocence. Then, “Breadless Bread Plate” indicated the potential corrupting influence of elitist customers. Finally, “Memory” and “The Mess” explored how an artist of lofty ideals might have become vulnerable to that influence.
But if corruption took place, what was the result? What does a corrupt artist look like? “Man’s Folly” finally illustrates this.
The dish’s introduction comes not from Slowik but from another sous-chef, Katherine Keller. Katherine describes how Slowik recently made sexual advances on her. When she refused, Slowik punished her by avoiding speaking to or even making eye contact with her. She explains that he can get away with these harmful actions: “He’s the star. He’s the man.”
Back in our analysis of “Breadless Bread Plate,” we identified five elitist distortions of the server-consumer relationship: entitlement, indifference, snobbery, exploitation, and infatuation. We also posited that given the restaurant’s repeated, exclusive exposure to wealthy customers, the chefs and staff could very well begin to alter their behavior (remember the Hawthorn effect) and even reflect the same attitudes as their guests.
And indeed, the story of Slowik sexually harassing Katherine contains something of all of the mindsets we identified. Entitled to her body, indifferent to her refusals, snobbish in his mistreatment of her afterward, exploitative in his attempt to use his fame for selfish purposes, and letting infatuation guide his actions, Slowik has truly become what he despises. He has become his elitist clientele.
Plus, Katherine goes on to stab Slowik with scissors in the thigh. This symbolizes that not only has Slowik become like his clientele, but he has become like his abusive father. These two trajectories, of course, are closely linked. After all, as we discussed in our analysis of “Memory” and as Slowik himself confirmed during the “Palate Cleanser,” his relationships with his parents helped ingrain his impulse to satisfy greedy, demanding individuals. In other words, the behavior of his customers has pushed him to develop traits to which he was already vulnerable due to childhood experiences.
Later, after the course, Slowik doesn’t mince words. He professes, “I’m a monster. I’m a whore.” And indeed, he has fallen from grace. Not only has he become the type of person who would cause harm and suffering, but he has become the type of chef who would disrupt the functioning of his kitchen for selfish reasons unrelated to his ostensible purpose: preparing great food.
He has tried, in other words, to escape his purpose. And to memorialize the futility of his effort, he allows his male guests to try—and inevitably fail—to escape the island.
Tyler’s Bullshit
Slowik then takes a detour from his planned menu. This is largely due to his interactions with Erin (Anna Taylor-Joy), a prostitute from Massachusetts who goes by the name Margot Mills.
After “Man’s Folly,” Slowik singles out Tyler, referring to him as an “unresolved situation.” Apparently, Slowik has been harboring particular disdain for Tyler. Most likely, this stems from the earlier revelation that Tyler, although previously aware that all guests would be killed, nevertheless hired Erin to accompany him to Hawthorn. Slowik is fond of Erin, having correctly deduced earlier that she’s a fellow service worker. (They even share a common customer: Mr. Leibrandt.) So he now gets revenge on her behalf.
His ingenious method of retaliation: to force Tyler to cook a meal. Because although Tyler knows many facts about fine dining and flavors, he truly has little understanding of them. He has merely reduced the eating experience to small snippets of knowledge, which he endlessly seeks out and recites. In other words, rather than hunger for food, Tyler perversely hungers for information about food.
This intellectualized approach is a travesty of dining, and its fundamental emptiness manifests in Tyler’s incoherent, bad-tasting meal. Slowik’s subsequent evaluation summarizes his contempt for Tyler and his focus on parts rather than the whole: “You have taken the mystery from our art.” He tells Tyler to hang himself, and he does.
Supplemental Course: A Cheeseburger
Again, this had appeared to be revenge on Erin’s behalf. But Erin, too, soon falls out of favor with Slowik by unsuccessfully trying to radio for help. This outrages the chef, who claims to have been “wrong” about her. He places her back with the greedy customers—or, as he calls them, “the takers.”
However, Erin at this point in the film makes a pivotal speech of her own. She criticizes Slowik for his “deconstructed avant bullshit,” accusing him of taking “the joy out of eating” with his arty metaphors.
These words hurt Slowik, who, as we’ve established, hates to leave anyone displeased. But even more importantly, we can infer based on our analysis thus far that Slowik longs to return to the simple approach to dining that Erin exemplifies. Unlike the elitist guests around her, who represent the clientele that Hawthorn has been serving for years, Erin only wants 1) to be full and 2) to eat tasty food. She doesn’t exhibit any of the corrupted attitudes we’ve described. Therefore, her speech, though harsh, also refreshes Slowik.
After all, he began his cooking career at a humble burger joint. Erin discovers as much when she spots a photo of a young Slowik cooking happily on the grill. Remembering the photo, she requests that he cook her a simple cheeseburger. He acquiesces and allows her to take the meal “to go”—a show of gratitude for enabling him to briefly reconnect with the joy of cooking (and, more generally, of serving).
Dessert: S’more
This happy moment, though, doesn’t reverse Slowik’s intention to complete his planned menu. He still sees both himself and his guests as beyond redemption. Therefore, he proceeds with a speech for his dessert.
First, he criticizes the “s’more” as a combination of mass-produced, bland ingredients. But he acknowledges that, despite this, the s’more still has the power to remind us of “innocence” and “childhood,” thanks to the addition of fire:
The purifying flame. It nourishes us, warms us, re-invents us, forges and destroys us. We must embrace the flame. We must be cleansed. Made clean. Like martyrs or heretics, we can be subsumed and made anew.
Guests, staff, chefs, and restaurant alike are therefore set ablaze in a human s’more. The intention: to return them to the kind of innocence symbolized by “The Island.” In other words, just as fire transforms the s’more from a collection of appalling industrial components into a beloved childhood classic, fire will purify the odiousness of Hawthorn and its guests. The menu comes full circle: this dessert literally returns the restaurant to nature, which Slowik praised in his first speech.
Plus, the symbolism of this last dish perfectly summarizes the main theme of the menu. Because although the rich diners demonstrate distinct flaws, each of their attitudes boils down to one fundamental fault: that they always want “some more.”
Greed. Materialism. These forces poison the creative process, and Slowik feels that he and his kitchen have been irretrievably tainted. He has succumbed to his customers’ ugly ways, which we enumerated in “Breadless Bread Plate.” And this owes in part to the vulnerabilities explored in “Memory,” which focused on childhood experiences, and “The Mess,” which focused on the taxing nature of service work. Having too long served an upper class demographic that lacks the ability to truly appreciate food (or, arguably, anything), Slowik has joined them in “Folly,” as epitomized by his sexual harassment of a fellow chef.
An intricate, ingenious performance—or is it? We should pause to reconsider. That’s because Erin, having escaped with her cheeseburger, ends the film by wiping her mouth with Slowik’s meticulously planned menu. Apparently, she still doesn’t think much of his grand ideas and subtle symbolism. And director Mark Mylod, by giving her the last word (or wipe), hints that he may agree.
But as your enterprising movie blogger, I refuse to join them. Without minds like Slowik’s, what would we watch and discuss?
Then again…a juicy cheeseburger right off the grill?
It’s a close call.
–Jim Andersen
For more movies explained, check out my piece on Nope.