When Fine Dining Is a Horror Show

polygon.com:

As the camera pans across a steel blue dining room, a small coterie of tech bros, celebrities, political power brokers, and food obsessives walks to their tables, past a kitchen where a team of identically uniformed chefs are working with almost military precision. The diners take their seats as nitrogen gas is used to turn milk into a powdery “snow,” and small half-spheres of pickled cucumber melon are meticulously plated onto a slab of dark stone with a pair of tweezers. Photos are forbidden, because the chef believes that the “beauty of his creations lie in their ephemeral nature.” When the chef finally does enter the room, the energy shifts entirely as those cucumber dots and milk snow come together to create the amuse-bouche. Dinner is served, and at the highly exclusive Hawthorne, that’s a terrifying prospect.

Hawthorne is the restaurant at the center of The Menu, one of fall’s most anticipated horror films, set to hit theaters on November 17. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, and John Leguizamo, it follows a group of people as they travel to a secluded island for a rarefied meal. As we learn in the opening seconds of the trailer, dinner at Hawthorne costs a whopping $1,250 per person, and the space seats only 12 people at its nightly service. It’s known for envelope-pushing modernist cuisine, the kind that involves various gels and foams and ferments, and its minimalist, slightly industrial interior aesthetic recalls real-life temples to modernist cuisine, like Geranium and Noma. Fiennes coolly commands his kitchen with terrifying precision, the sudden clap of his hand serving as both a startle and signal that the next course is about to arrive.

As you might expect, these guests end up being treated to a