The stomach-churning film exposing the world of fine dining

Mark Mylod knows how to capture on camera the perfect crust: crispy, glistening, the promise of juice underneath. The director achieves a smorgasbord of “food porn” shots like this on The Menu, his brilliant new movie that roasts and skewers the world of high-end restaurants. But given that the Brit perfected his gastro skills on Game of Thrones, then went on to direct Succession (on which one episode memorably featured vast platters of lobster rotting in bins), you can bet his dining scenes often come with a nasty aftertaste.

“I filmed a sequence where the grayscale [skin disease] was being removed with a lance from the chest of Iain Glenn's character,” Mylod says. Mylod then cut from the image of the unfortunate knight’s crusty, pus-oozing skin infection to a shot of a spoon breaking into a pie.

“The food stylist matched the texture of the crusted pastry to the prosthetics of the greyscale. So it was like the spoon was going into Iain’s skin. And we got this lovely gooey texture, with the tendrils of the meat and the dripping juices, as the character put the spoon into his mouth. It took months to perfect, looked absolutely disgusting, and I'm really proud of it!”

Yum. There are similar, deliciously stomach-churning moments aplenty in The Menu. Starring Ralph Fiennes as a disillusioned head chef at an exclusive restaurant on a private island, the black comedy follows a group of super-rich diners - from Silicon Valley “tech bros” to a fading Hollywood actor and his long-suffering assistant - as they undergo an evening that neither they nor the kitchen staff will ever forget.

Among the other guests is a food snob, perfectly portrayed by Nicholas Hoult, who fanboys over Fiennes’s Chef Slowik; his date (Anya Taylor-Joy), who has a distinctly more disdainful view of the wonders of molecular gastronomy; and an elderly couple so privileged they’ve dined more times at the exclusive restaurant than they care to remember (and, in fact, can’t remember any of the food).

Possibly the most heinous character of all, however, is a food critic. Lillian, who claims to have discovered Chef Slowik, is played by Janet McTeer. The Newcastle-born actress researched the role with Ruth Reichl, who spent two decades at the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. “Ruth and I talked about how, at a certain point, it can become all about the critic,” McTeer has said. “But a good restaurant critic should be anonymous. Ideally, you’d go into a restaurant and you don’t know they’re there. But my character shows up with pink hair and a great suit so people will [see her].”

The stage, then, is set for a film that bitingly lampoons a particular class of chef and diner. Not many dramas had done this until recently. But this year, as well as The Menu, there has been the acclaimed Boiling Point, starring Stephen Graham as a burnt-out head chef (now being made into a TV series); The Bear, a recent hit on Disney+, about a charismatic young fine-dining talent who ends up working at a scruffy cafe; and Mammals, which launched on Amazon Prime last Friday and stars James Corden as a troubled chef.

Drama’s previous neglect of the world of fine-dining was one of the reasons Mylod says he was attracted to The Menu. “The script [by Succession writer Will Tracy and his writing partner Seth Reiss] was perfect equal triangles of comedy, thriller and satire – in a world that felt cinematically really fresh to me, and also a world that I knew so little about,” he says.

To ensure he got the foodie world right, the 57-year-old sought the help of real chefs. He also binged all 38 episodes of Chef’s Table, an American documentary series that takes viewers inside the kitchens of the trade’s biggest names, from Massimo Bottura to Dan Barber and Alain Passard. He encouraged the actors to watch it, too.

“The first place I pointed Ralph to was the episode with Grant Achatz [of the Michelin-starred restaurant Alinea, in Chicago], for that relentless pursuit of innovation and evolution of the art, and the utter commitment – life-threatening commitment in the case of Grant.” (Achatz was diagnosed with mouth cancer in 2007, the treatment for which temporarily cost him his sense of taste.)

The director also dispatched Hoult to dine at The Fat Duck in Berkshire, with Heston Blumenthal’s status as a pioneer of molecular gastronomy a key influence on Slowik’s character. Mylod also “looked at” René Redzepi at Noma, Ferran Adrià [of the fabled, now-closed El Bulli] and Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry. “From those,” he says, “we Frankensteined the part of Chef Slowik.”

Very much more than a cinematic sous chef was Mylod’s eventual technical advisor, Dominique Crenn, whose San Francisco establishment, Atelier Crenn, has three Michelin stars. The France-born chef hosted a “boot camp” for the actors playing the kitchen staff, “so that everybody was doing the right thing for that particular course.”

“We're pushing the idea that there's a military precision, and obviously we take that up a notch in terms of how the kitchen operates with that level of choreography,” says Mylod. “But it was hugely important to us: if you're going to satirise something, it has to be authentic.”

First and foremost, of course, that meant the food.

“Something I love about Dominique's cooking is there's a specific emotional warmth to her, and it trickles into her food as well,” he says. In the film, the names of the dishes amplify the “beats” of the narrative, he adds, notably in a dish called “Man’s Folly”. I’ll leave the ingredients mysterious, but its thematic meaning is clear.

“It speaks to the innate sexism of the restaurant industry,” says Mylod. “Dominique, as the only female chef in America to have three Michelin stars, is obviously [aware of that].”

Ultimately, though, after completing The Menu, Mylod found he had a new appreciation for molecular gastronomy. “I have incredible respect for the very thing we're having a poke at,” he says. It is the way the culinary genre has been “denatured [by] excessive commerce” that the film satirises. “All artists, no matter what the field, [take] those wrong turns. And that to me was as much a character thing about Chef Slowik and how self-loathing goes with that sense of selling out.”

To say everyone in the film gets their just desserts is barely the half of it. Mark Mylod, meanwhile, is currently in the midst of filming the fourth series of Succession, due on our screens next spring.

If he brings to that even a soupçon of the devilish fun he’s had with The Menu, that blockbuster TV series will satisfy anyone hungry for more tales from the world of the super rich.

The Menu is in cinemas from November 18