Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1485934
T H E M E N U | P E R S P E C T I V E 1 2 1 with a new menu. This would, therefore, be the 100-person staff's last time serving their famous dishes. Over a 16-course meal that lasted seven hours, boundaries between upstairs and downstairs blurred, staff and patrons drinking, dancing and eating till the wee hours of the morning. They pulled back the curtain, showed us the wizard, brought us to the fermentation chambers, dry cellars, places where ant enzymes marinated with deer moss, where magic was taking place. I left at sunrise, stumbling home, depressed to be back on earth, certain I'd been in the presence of gods. It was with this reverence that I hoped to one day design a film about not just fine dining, but the immersive culture around it. When I read the script for The Menu—a terrifying, hilarious film set entirely on the island of a destination restaurant—I was struck by how cleverly the writers aligned the structure of a prix-fixed meal with that of a five-act screenplay. The story turns left when you expect it to turn right, and the film's restaurant—Hawthorne, an extension of chef Julian Slowik's ephemeral obsessions—is a character in whose palm it tightens, impressive, foreboding, mysterious. This film was a designer's dream. A. HAWTHORNE DINING ROOM PRODUCTION STILL.