Every restaurant that inspired the making of ‘The Menu’
Restaurants are supposed to be a space to relax. They’re a place to let go and let your senses dance as an expert takes over. Hopefully, they’re a place to experience nothing but deliciousness and delight. But in The Menu, a five-star experience became a fright. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor Joy, and Nicholas Hoult, the film was set in a fictional restaurant where horrors ensue from the ashes of pretension. But that pretence found real-life inspiration as the film borrows details from a few actual restaurants.
Taking luxury to the further extreme, where it passes beyond enjoyment into true eye-roll territory, we’re talking flavoured steam and food being treated like a science project or shrunk down to nothing more than a bite or a splatter. It probably would have been slander if Fiennes had based his head chef character, Julian Slowik, on just one person. Instead, he’s an amalgamation of a collection of global leaders in the culinary world.
One of them was even invited into the process, proving that he had enough humour to see himself be parodied. Dominique Crenn, the chef behind San Francisco’s Atelier Crenn, was brought onto the team as a consultant, helping to not only shape the character of Slowik but also figure out the actual menu for the film. Crenn is known for creating menus in the form of poems, something the movie borrowed for its plot.
The other chefs, however, weren’t consultants but were more fascinating figures to study as the film crew attempted to be the most pretentious of all the superior restaurants. One of them was Chicago’s Alinea, where Grant Achatz is the head chef. If you order a dessert at Alinea, your entire table will become the plate as an elaborate design is laid out. More akin to a painting than a pudding, it features swipes and dots of different flavours that you must unceremoniously attempt to scoop up and lick. In The Menu, this is extended into an entire floor, with its diners becoming a disturbing part of the picture.
Another source of inspiration comes from Eleven Madison Park and its chef, Daniel Humm. After splashing out thousands on a meal, experiencing the very height of culinary ingenuity, their clients leave with a goodie bag of…cereal. Well, granola, to be exact, but still, it feels like a slap in the face. No change was necessary for that detail as it fits right into The Menu’s exaggerated restaurant, Hawthorne.
Perhaps the most ridiculous detail about Hawthorne is that the diners must get a boat to a secluded island just for their meal. It would seem utterly unrealistic if it weren’t plucked from real life. To dine at the Willows Inn, you have to get a ferry to the island of Lummi, off the coast of Washington, to be able to sample food from chef Blaine Wetzel.
Once they get off the boat, it’s still not direct to the restaurant. The film’s characters wander through elaborate greenhouses where all the ingredients are sourced or grown from just outside the door. This is the case at Chef Magnus Nilsson’s Fäviken, where the team even catch their own fish. While that’s definitely ostentatious, the farm-to-plate thing is definitely in, so why not do it to the most extreme and direct extent?
In 2019, Fäviken announced its closure. It was once described as “the world’s most daring restaurant”, but the chef admitted that he simply got bored of the place, closing the restaurant when he realised, “For the first time ever, I woke up and didn’t want to go to work.” Providing inspiration for the matter of fact, cold chef in the movie, Nilsson is just as strange of a figure. He once admitted that he purposefully didn’t take care of an ice cream maker to add to the theatre of the place, stating, “I deliberately don’t take care of my ice cream maker so it will make a lot of eeer-awww, eeeeh-errrkk sounds.”
Hopefully, though, no horrors occur at these real-life restaurants like they do at Hawthorne. The only scare will be the amount on the bill.
Restaurants that inspired The Menu:
- Atelier Crenn – San Fransisco
- Alinea – Chicago
- Eleven Madison Park – New York
- Willows Inn – Lummi
- Fäviken – Sweden
