A recent addition to streaming services (Disney+ in the UK), The Menu invites a group of select guests to Ralph Fiennes’ exclusive, island restaurant for an unforgettable experience: one that (spoilers!) they won’t return from. If you know your Cornell, or riffs on the timeless ‘greatest game is man’ theme, you’ll see where Mark Mylod’s take-no-prisoners horror-thriller is going well before Fiennes sharpens his first knife, but this expectation doesn’t lessen the experience; rather, it only helps whet your appetite for some carnal comeuppance. 

Aside from its content, the context into which The Menu has been released is also interesting. Ready Or Not?, Boiling Point, The White Lotus, Triangle Of Sadness, The Bear and both Knives Out and sequel Glass Onion… The Menu is the latest in what’s become a prevalent trend of ‘eat the rich’ media, and maybe the most near-literal example. And in many of these, the emergent environment best suited to dismantle classism is the service industry. But why is this, and why now? 

Firstly, there’s the juxtaposition of an ongoing cost of living crisis with the rich getting even richer. Last year, amid record-high fuel prices, seven of the world’s biggest oil companies reaped the rewards of almost year-long profits. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have also paid nothing in taxes for multiple years. In its 2022 report, the World Inequality Lab explained that while wealth inequality in the western world was trending downwards at the start of the 20th century, it began to increase in the 80s and has continued to rise ever since due to a “large inequality in growth rates between the top and the bottom of the wealth distribution”.

The backdrop of COVID can’t be ignored. The report continues: “This increase has been exacerbated during the COVID pandemic. In fact, 2020 marked the largest increase in the share of global billionaires’ wealth available on record.” The pandemic caused huge disruption to everything, of course, but hospitality took a particularly hefty wallop (to the tune of hundreds of billions in the UK alone). Even when the various lockdowns eased, the lasting damage was more than financial. Having gotten some distance from it all to reflect, many former staffers didn’t want to return to poor working conditions, low pay and ungrateful customers. This has led to a flurry of unionisation and affirmative action, though it’s worth adding the ‘union boom’ is growing faster in the public than the private sector. So, how has all this anxiety and instability manifested in pop culture of late?

Kitchens and fine dining environments have been common shorthand for literature and mass media to comment on classism for a while. Peter Greenaway’s lustful and cannibalistic The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was a reaction to the rise of the ‘nouveau riche’ in 80s Britain, itself inspired by a play from the 1600s. 2003’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King isn’t the film ‘eat the rich’ film that’d spring to anyone’s mind, but another Peter – Jackson, this time – does infamously use a rich meal, enjoyed by a callous ruler as his men ride to their deaths, to illustrate privilege: most of the food we see eaten by other characters in the thick of the fight are simple stews and dry bread. The scene is made more grossly visceral with close-ups of juices dribbling down his chin and the sounds of slurping and chewing, demonstrating the power food can have in cinema.

Food, at its most basic level, is sustenance to keep us alive. Food culture, therefore, turns a basic necessity into high art with a high (inflated) value attached, and this is even harder to swallow in a climate where food banks can’t keep up with demand and homelessness is rampant. In The Menu, Fiennes’ head chef Julian Slowik makes this point using bread – something even the poorest in this world can make cheaply and easily, he points out. His rich diners have no need for such ‘lowly’ pleasures; therefore, he serves a bread-less bread plate to them. Some are gullible enough to misinterpret it as satire. Others see it for what it is: an insult. 

High-end kitchens follow strict, militarised structures that can easily normalise abusive and toxic work environments. There’s a clear ‘upstairs, downstairs’ divide between kitchen and dining area, with the latter typically hidden from diners. The Menu’s exclusive, invite-only eatery Hawthorn, however, has an open kitchen with the chefs in full view of the diners. Interestingly, this kitchen is physically higher up than the dining area, instantly establishing a reversal to the usual power balance – and Slovik is the one holding it all. His staff are cult-like in their deference to him, readily offering themselves up for self-sacrifice while professing their love (in shouted chorus): a twisted and extreme take on the kitchen hierarchy where the head chef is a godlike presence to be feared, worshipped and followed.

The ‘menu’ in question here isn’t just the dishes but those eating them, carefully chosen by Slovik to balance the flavour of an experience that is equal parts pleasure and punishment. Some of the guests are food snobs who can’t cook themselves, while others are diners who have no appreciation of food but just want to be seen in expensive places; critics whose words have destroyed entire restaurants; and stock market bros whose dirty Wall Street money turns places like Hawthorn into just another portfolio brag. One is merely an actor who starred in a film Slovik hated. Do they all deserve to be roasted like marshmallows, as per the fiery, sweet revenge of the final course? I’d wager most of the audience would argue the penalty doesn’t fit the crime, but this isn’t about justice – it’s about vengeful madness, and the reason behind that madness.  

Slovik is a monster, but he still earns a smidge of sympathy. Most of us have some idea, even if we’ve never worked in customer service, of how gruelling and unrewarding it can be. He may have started cooking for the love of it but when we find him, he’s jaded to the point of murder – and while extreme, it’s not impossible to consider how his life experiences have pushed him over the edge. 

Another head chef pushed over the edge is Stephen Graham’s Andy Jones of Boiling Point. Stylistically, Phillip Barantini’s film couldn’t be further from Mylod’s, which is full of theatrical flair. Boiling Point is famous for being done in one take, masking a tightly-planned shoot with no-frills realism. The camera acts as a fly on the wall, moving fluidly between kitchen to dining area to even the grimy alleyways outside – eroding any separation between customer, server and bottom-feeder. It’s easy for us, as diners, to ignore the blisters, scalds, and knicks going into our food preparation. Boiling Point makes us confront this harsh reality, that even in one of London’s top restaurants, the nature of high-pressured servitude rarely provides adequate payoff. Over the course of the film, a busy front of house, incompetent colleagues, showboating peers, a messy personal life and addiction problems push Jones to, well, you can guess.

Most of Boiling Point’s clientele are just as insufferable as The Menu’s, from a racist dad and his spoiled kids to a handsy hen party, treating their servers’ own bodies as commodities to entertain. But while Slovik takes the whole thing down in a cathartic explosion, Jones goes out with a whimper: imploding alone, quietly, from an overdose. Food continues to be served. Diners continue their conversations.

Another no-holds-barred depiction of a head chef’s steady decline can be found on television: the highly-lauded The Bear. Carmine is a rare example of someone who trained with the best of the best but, due to the suicide of his brother, is pulled back home to run the family restaurant. With fast-paced editing and white-knuckle acting, The Bear puts the audience right in the middle of the kitchen maelstrom, and Carmine at the eye of the storm. As the series progresses, we’re given glimpses of his time at some of the world’s finest establishments – flashbacks of a more orderly working environment, yet earfuls of abuse from a ‘genius’ boss. 

The trade-off of slumming it in a diner is being his own boss, but faced with the added pressure of running a business and not just cooking for one, Carmine soon finds himself falling into similar toxic management traits, compounded by addiction issues. At his worst moment, he accidentally starts a kitchen fire and for a few moments stares blankly into the flames, hoping his problems will be swallowed up into ash and soot: a severe wake-up call.

The Bear is transparently about burnout, grind culture, and substance abuse, but there’s still a bubbling undercurrent of social commentary. Carmine tried to better himself using food as his ladder to a more elite world. While it made him a better chef, it leaves him worse off as a person, and he returns home not as a local hero but as a battered veteran, with the family business just another warzone of shouting, hot stoves, interpersonal drama, and crumbling equipment for him to fight his way through. In upper-class circles, he had to work himself to the bone to fit in, only to be forced to give it all up. Now back at his humble beginnings, he also doesn’t fit in – viewed as too educated by his salt-of-the-earth-and-proud cousin, and resented by his sister for abandoning the nest. In this, The Bear makes dilemmas about class division acutely personal rather than structural: the division between individuals rather than communities, and the stigma and guilt attached to crossing those boundaries. Food and food culture becomes divisive, even abusive.

However, in the show’s calmer moments, it’s also food that reforges these severed bonds: coming around a table to eat together after a hard day’s work; sharing memories of favourite dishes; helping each other improve in the kitchen. In this, the idea of betterment stops becoming about social mobility and self-improvement for the sake of personal fulfilment. Food becomes de-politicised and is instead, nourishing – as it always should be.

The common thread between these three is power, control and sacrifice. Though very different pieces of ‘eat the rich’ media, The Menu, Boiling Point and The Bear can be boiled down into both power and powerlessness fantasies, in which the only way out is destruction.

words HANNAH COLLINS