The Menu Had Help From Four Michelin Star Chef Dominique Crenn
Mark Mylod's new film "The Menu," currently playing in theaters, is about a group of ultra-rich food snobs who have agreed to take part in one of the world's most exclusive dining experiences. For $1,250 a head, they will dine at Hawthorne, a restaurant located on a private island, wholly devoted entirely to the preparation of its cuisine. The assistant chefs live there, the meats are cured and prepared there, and the fish and plants are harvested there. Hawthorne is overseen by the respected and feared Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), a conceptual chef who prepares massively complicated meals that, by his dictate, feature subtle commentaries on the relationship between food and class. For example, when it comes time to serve bread, Chef Julian explains that bread is a simple food of "the common man," and serves spreads, dips, and olive oils ... without actual bread.
"The Menu" will become increasingly ghoulish from there, and eventually, will playfully tilt into horror.
Nicholas Hoult plays Tyler, a Chef Julian fanboy who seems far too enamored of everything the restaurateur says and does, much to the annoyance of his last-minute date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), a diner who has no knowledge of, nor fondness for, Julian's pretentious haute cuisine.
In a recent episode of "Notes on a Scene," Vanity Fair's video series wherein actors and directors break down moments from their recent works, Hoult, Taylor-Joy, and Mylod dissect "The Menu," and point out the contributions from actual celebrity chef Dominique Crenn, the real chef behind Chef Julian's creations. Crenn is currently the executive chef of Atelier Crenn, a Michelin three-star pescetarian restaurant in San Francisco.
All about Dominique Crenn
Dominique Crenn was raised in France, often eating on her family farm as well as in high-end restaurants frequented by her politician father. In the 1980s, she would work in several notable restaurants and eventually become the head chef of the Intercontinental Hotel in Jakarta. She would have to leave Indonesia in 1998 due to the country's increasingly violent unrest, unfortunately. She once served as the executive at the now-defunct Adobe in Santa Monica, California, and the Manhattan Country Club in Manhattan Beach (two eateries remembered well by this author, local to Santa Monica). She opened Atelier Crenn in 2011, and the smaller Bar Crenn in 2016, itself holder of one Michelin star. She is also currently engaged to actress Maria Bello. In a 2012 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Crenn described her dishes as "poetic culinaria."
The production designer on "The Menu," Ethan Tobman, spent a lot of time with Crenn to get restaurant details right, and Crenn — in a recent interview with Variety — said she completely sympathized with Chef Julian's annoyance with not only restaurant critics, but the new breed of Instagram diners who like to photograph meals prior to eating them. "It's kind of a bully type of thing," she said, "because the pressure in the kitchen is so high — mentally you can get really affected and then you lose it."
Crenn seems to have accurately communicated the intensity of a kitchen, as well as the military-like power structure one might see. In the "Notes from a Scene" episode, Hoult commented that the assistant chefs were convincingly intimidating. Taylor-Joy commented that they stuck to their choreography well, seemingly preparing actual meals on camera.
Chef boot camp
Mark Mylod describes the intense cooking "boot camp" that he had his chef actors go through. Prior to filming, the second assistant director on "The Menu," teamed up with another real chef — the Savannah-based executive behind Loki and Common Thread — to assure that the kitchen was run correctly. Crenn would then assist further, putting authenticity into the cuisine and its preparation. According to Mylod, whatever audiences could see the chefs doing in the background was correct for whatever foods they would be preparing:
"We had this one-week boot camp with Lauren Candela, our Second AD, and John Benhase, our local brilliant chef from Savannah. And also overseen by Dominique Crenn, of course. Three Michelin star, you know, literally the only woman in America still to have three Michelin stars. Getting that kind of backup in the kitchen was a massive thing for me to make sure we had that authenticity [...] Literally everything is completely correct for whatever course is being prepared."
Anya Taylor-Joy recalls a day when Crenn came to visit the sat to oversee things, and was dazzled. She had to give a good performance for the cameras, but the pressure was on when sitting in Crenn's presence. She said:
"I remember when Dominque came on set, all of us were really starstruck because we'd been obsessed like, 'don't mess it up, don't mess it up.'"
Crenn can also be seen competing on "The Next Iron Chef," "Iron Chef America," and "Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend" on Netflix, but for those looking to eat her cuisine in real life, Atelier Crenn will be closed for the month of January.