Yes, Chef!
Thoughts on The Menu, Noma, and fine dining. Plus, a recipe for salted butterscotch brownies.
Note: potential spoilers ahead.
First things first, I feel like I need to address the fact that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay co-produced this movie because no one else is talking about it. I thought they weren't on speaking terms! Just to give you some context: Will Ferrell is, or maybe was, one of the executive producers of Succession; he and McKay ran Gary Sanchez Productions together and worked on movies like Step Brothers and Vice. In an interview, McKay mentioned that Ferrell was upset when he gave the role of Lakers Owner Jerry Buss to John C. Reilly without consulting Ferrell first, thus ending their partnership. Drama!
Anyway. The Menu.
I’m personally into anything that plays into the theme of eating the rich and making fun of the elite, and I’m also a little biased because I like most of the things McKay does — namely, Succession and The Big Short. Mark Mylod, who IMO directed the best episodes of Succession, was also the one who directed this, so all of that mixed with food, satire, and morbid humour felt like this was made for me.
Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) serves a $1,250 per person 10-course meal at his world-renowned restaurant on a private island. Among the diners are Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), Chef’s Table-obsessed and Pacojet-owning pretentious food dude, and Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), an unexpected guest who couldn’t care less about fine dining. Everyone’s having a great time, except they’re not.
Each course is presented with a story and intentionally gets darker and darker. They’re clever but twisted. Beautiful but dead. None of them look appetizing or filling, but it ends with a life-saving cheeseburger.
The Menu perfectly paints a tortuous picture of some real-life fine dining establishments and what it’s like to work and eat in one. Fine dining is where food is both religion and military. It’s pristine yet catastrophic. It’s farm-to-table roasted plums with thyme and artfully plated moss with truffle shavings. It’s elaborate, captivating, and unnecessary all at once.
This week, René Redzepi announced that his three-Michelin-star restaurant Noma is closing its doors — 11 years after El Bulli, a former three-Michelin-star restaurant by Ferran Adrià, also ceased operations.
Redzepi says the business model of running a fine dining restaurant has become unsustainable. He plans to focus on turning Noma into a food laboratory while doing pop-ups and e-comm. Similar to Adrià, who closed El Bulli and turned it into a creative foundation after they started losing half a million euros a year.
Restaurants like Noma and El Bulli created this immaculate image of haute cuisine, which a lot of culinary students worshipped — and probably continue to do so. I know because I went to culinary school about ten years ago and was surrounded by all of these budding chefs dying to do a stage at a Michelin-starred restaurant. I, at one point, aspired to be like Thomas Keller, too.
Haute cuisine inspired cooks, but it also created people like Tyler from The Menu — the kind of people who don’t actually know how to cook a balanced meal and would risk everything to dine at a world-renowned restaurant just for the experience and clout. There is no winning in fine dining. When food is only catered to the elite, the beauty of it being a universal language is lost.
Salted Butterscotch Brownies
Butterscotch brownies are one of the first recipes I learned to bake when I first worked in a kitchen. I remember being obsessed with making them because it was so easy and only took 25-30 minutes from prep to oven. This is one of those recipes anyone could make. Let’s say you happen to be the cook in your relationship, but your partner wants to try and make something — this recipe is a good starting point.
This recipe is a slight upgrade from your usual butterscotch brownies as it calls for salted butter. I know a lot of chefs are against using salted butter because they want to control the amount of salt. It’s a valid point, but sometimes, salted butter is actually handy. It’s never really too salty; if it is, the brown sugar in this recipe will balance it out. No problem!
The specks you find on top come from browning the butter. I tried my best to describe how to do this, but in case you need more guidance, feel free to watch this video from SAVEUR.
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