Opinion
The world’s fanciest restaurants are ridiculous (and so am I)
Ben Groundwater
Travel writerMostly, you follow the Betoota Advocate to laugh at other people. Australia’s leading satirical news site – and, allegedly, oldest newspaper – skewers politicians, real-estate agents, Millennials, country bumpkins, latte-sippers, tradies, Boomers and just about everyone else on the planet.
The only thing is, at some point that “everyone else” will almost certainly include you. The site just can’t pump out that much satire day after day and not eventually turn its sights on people who seem uncomfortably similar to the person reading it.
I call it “getting Betoota’d”. And we all get Betoota’d sooner or later. The key is just to laugh at yourself – though that’s not always easy. Check the comments on some of the posts and you will always see people getting upset. “Big swing and a miss boys,” they’ll say. “This ain’t it fellas.” Etcetera.
The Menu is a brutal satire of foodie culture.
Which brings us to The Menu. That is, the movie called The Menu, starring Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy. It was released last year, and is streaming now in Australia.
The Menu is sold as a horror film, though really it’s a brutal satire on the fine-dining experience. In the movie, the main characters travel out to a high-end restaurant on a private island, where they’re all served a degustation menu by legendary chef Julian Slowik.
Throughout, the filmmakers peel away the artifice of this three-Michelin-star-style dining and reveal the pointless pretension beneath it. The hero-worship of chefs. The elevation of food to fine-art status. The way diners are forced to create a narrative for themselves that justifies spending all this money on a single meal.
I watched The Menu with my partner, Jess, a week or so ago and about halfway through it she turned to me and said, “It’s us, isn’t it? They’re making fun of us.”
We’d been Betoota’d. Because, yeah, sometimes I eat at fine-dining restaurants when I travel. For me it can be a real highlight of a journey, something special, a way to send a holiday into the stratosphere.
I’ve also been to a couple of restaurants that are not at all dissimilar to the fictional eatery in The Menu. In fact, I’m almost 100 per cent sure the filmmakers have dined at one restaurant in particular, Mugaritz, an eatery that very finely treads the line – frequently stepping either side of it – of breathtaking genius and outrageous bullshit.
I love good food. I love good food in all its guises and appearances and price tags, from every corner of the world. I love Singaporean hawker centres, Spanish tapas bars, Italian trattorias, Mexican street food stands, Japanese yakitori bars, Argentinian parrillas, Cantonese dim sum places, Indian thali joints, American food trucks, Peruvian cevicherias, French bistros and so much more.
And I also, occasionally, love a fancy restaurant. I will travel just for a fancy restaurant. Proper destination dining. I don’t do it often, because you can’t. It’s all too much. But every now and then, there’s nothing quite like going big on a meal and an experience that is essentially perfection on a plate. Or 18 plates.
Only, it’s a bit harder to appreciate that perfection now, after seeing The Menu. A few days after recognising ourselves in the film, Jess and I travelled to regional Victoria to dine at Brae, chef Dan Hunter’s now-legendary fine-diner, and it was very hard to ignore the parallels with the movie.
The first dish served at Brae was two sorrel leaves on a plate. One leaf for each of us. I mean, yeah, those leaves were dressed with an apple and cucumber vinaigrette, and they were only meant as a fun way to begin a long, complex meal with something simple and natural and perfect – and they were also really tasty.
But you still couldn’t escape the feeling… Is Dan Hunter about to walk out of the kitchen and clap, and have all the cooks yell, “We love you chef”?
Dan Hunter at Brae – would he suddenly walk out of the kitchen and clap?
There is an inherent ridiculousness to fine-dining. And you could argue that it doesn’t make for much of a travel experience either, given so many leading restaurants around the world are now all doing versions of what is essentially the same thing.
Plenty of chefs take notice of things like 50 Best lists and Michelin stars, they see what’s trending, what judges like, and they work to that theme. What does that then say about the region you’re dining in, its culture, its history, its passions? Probably not a lot.
The newest version of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list was announced this week. The restaurants that appear there will form a bucket-list for a lot of food-obsessed travellers, people who might be able to see themselves in Nicholas Hoult’s fanboy character in The Menu, and maybe not enjoy that realisation.
But we all get Betoota’d eventually. You just have to laugh at it.
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