An expert in a dying field?
The mortality and morality of "The Menu" and "Turn Every Page"
***Spoilers below for The Menu and Turn Every Page—you have been warned.***
This week, I managed to have two moments of reckoning with my professional past. First, on Friday night, I watched The Menu, which I had waited for with a degree of anticipation much like what a lobster might have as it watches a large pot of water come to a boil. Then on Saturday, I saw Turn Every Page, a documentary on the shared lives and legacies of the writer Robert Caro and the editor Robert Gottlieb. (A disclosure: one of the characters skewered in The Menu is meant to be a restaurant critic at Saveur, for whom I do contractual work as a recipes editor, and I began my career at Alfred A. Knopf, Gottlieb’s employer and Caro’s publisher.)
I knew going into both of these films that my viewing experience was not going to be a dispassionate one. I remembered my encounter with Gottlieb the summer prior to starting my job at Alfred A. Knopf, in which he spoke at the Columbia Publishing Course (an engagement that he has kept for many, many summers, and is depicted in the film). Gottlieb spoke of a life in books that so many CPC students (overwhelmingly female and white) had dreamed of, the chance to apply their love of literature to a greater commercial landscape—to read for a living, and a calling. Gottlieb is the kind of editor that mostly doesn’t exist anymore—one that line-edits, that massages the sentence down to the level of the semi-colon, that understands that being the ideal reader is an essential ingredient to being a great editor. Though he acknowledges he is not entirely egoless (“I have plenty of ego”), he also prefers to be an invisible part of the author’s success. As he noted in The Paris Review, “this glorification of editors, of which I have been an extreme example, is not a wholesome thing…. Somehow, to be helpful, an editor has to embody authority yet not become possessive or controlling.” The art, the book, has to stand independent of its influencer, and it takes a lot of ego to produce egoless art.
This question of where authority lies, and whether we should tolerate its self-declaration, underpins everything about The Menu, a film that castigates almost every approach to food in the fine dining world, and enjoys the mess it makes in the process. The film isn’t subtle, but profoundly fun to watch as someone who’s always had an uneasy relationship with elite culinary environments, especially as places where you can pay out the nose and leave saying, to paraphrase David Sedaris, “that was so bad,” immediately followed by the statement, “And there was so little of it!” Yet the film saves its greatest criticism for its central character, the sociopathic genius chef Julian Slowik, who has reached the point where the precision of his cuisine has been sapped of all emotional pleasure. Slowik, of course, blames the customer, and the dining establishment at large, for “the ruin of my art and my life,” and so has decided he will kill the twelve guests in attendance, and his entire staff, in one final marshmallow-infused blaze of glory.
Everyone will perish but one, it seems—Margot (Anya-Taylor Joy), this film’s “final girl”, the lone diner who dares not to worship at Slowik’s feet, but instead demands that he put the food first, not his own reputation. “You’ve taken the joy out of eating,” she declares, “Every dish you served tonight has been some intellectual exercise rather than something you want to sit and enjoy. When I eat your food, it tastes like it was made with no love…. Even your hot dishes are cold.” This critique isn’t an old one—it is the critique against culinary elitism that has been in circulation throughout the twentieth century. But what Margot’s critique also carries with it is the certainty that, in elevating the craft of food over the joy of food, it also narrows the scope of culinary excellence to that of a singular voice, a single set of criteria for what constitutes “good food.” What has been served to them that evening has not been “salt, sugar, protein, bacteria, fungi, various plants and animals, and, at times, entire ecosystems.” It has been reputation, arrogance, the name of the dish’s progenitor. If all Margot can taste is Slowik’s prestige, she is not only bored, but “still fucking hungry.” No wonder she asks him for a cheeseburger—a dish that he could not possibly claim to have created, and whose reputation is larger than Slowik’s will ever be.
The specter of mortality hangs over both of these films—not only the mortality of its central characters and protagonists (Gottlieb is 91, Caro is 87), but also the nature of the industries they represent. Not only are editors like Gottlieb a dying breed, but both the publishing industry and the scholarship of historians are on the decline, as the work dries up and the narratives are attacked on all sides. The institutions that have loomed large in fine dining have still not recovered from the pandemic, and with the closure of one of its last grand temples, a necessary reckoning is finally coming into play. Neither the publishing nor the restaurant industry has fully addressed the exploitation of their workers—my starting salary at Knopf in 2006 was $32,000 a year, while some friends working at smaller presses outside the Big Six (now Five) were paid far less and had to take multiple jobs to make ends meet. Chefs starting out in elite establishments work for $15/hour, if they are paid at all.
Both industries, like academia, believe that it is enough to be “paid in prestige,” and for a while, I was happy to tolerate that. These are dream jobs because they exist in spaces where we fantasize about them regardless of the material sacrifices they entail—the long hours, the deeply intrenched hierarchies, the remote possibility of advancement up the food chain. Yet people like Gottlieb never seemed entranced by the prestige of the jobs, only the collaborative work it could entail. When Gottlieb is asked to explain the nature of his relationship with Bob Caro, he says, “He does the work, I do the clean-up. Then we fight.” He likes the mess, because that’s where the magic happens. In one of the miraculous final sequences of the file, Caro and Gottlieb are finally shown working side-by-side, albeit with the sound turned off—a moment to preserve just a little bit of the mystery and the magic.
Sometimes I wonder if it was foolish—to fall in love with literature, then with cookbooks, then with a life in food, without thinking about the details about how it would keep me materially fed and financially sound. It is certainly evidence of my own privilege that the prestige of both fields has been, and continued to be, so alluring. Yet I also crave that feeling that Margot demands at the end of The Menu, to be briefly existing on the same plane as Slowik, and to have a moment of mutual recognition and true satisfaction. But I also understand the desire for an alternate ending in which, rather than self-immolation, Slowik chose to offer himself as the final course to the guests, a chance and challenge to save themselves if they only made their worship literally, and, perhaps, to put their mouths where their money was. And to savor every bite…
Recommendation: This excellent article on the limitations—and yet possibilities—of the “foodie fever dream” that inspires and sustains restaurants even when the numbers don’t entirely work out, by Vivian Howard in the NYT.
The Perfect Bite: The pan-fried and baked baby pumpkin topped with a yogurt garlic sauce at The Helmand in Cambridge, just prior to seeing Turn Every Page at Kendall. Absolutely delicious prelude to a truly delicious film.
Cooked & Consumed: After a container of hummus was rejected from my snack duty at school this week (because “the kids don’t eat it”, ah well), I spooned the entire thing into a skillet, stirred in some chopped lupini beans and drizzled with olive oil, then baked a la Joe Yonan’s approach in this excellent Washington Post article. Made a really nice bed underneath some harissa-roasted fish on a Friday night…