After hearing the sudden and unexpected news that Noma, often described as the “world’s best restaurant,” will be shutting down next year, people are pointing the finger at Ralph Fiennes’ new movie “The Menu.” The dark comedy, which takes a swipe at pretentious fine dining culture, is to blame for René Redzepi’s Noma, according to many lovers of the Copenhagen restaurant.
- “The Menu” is one of Ralph Fiennes’ most interesting roles in years. He plays the snobby chef Slowik who runs an exclusive restaurant on a remote island that people come from far and wide to experience. Anya-Taylor Joy (“The Queen’s Gambit”) and Nicholas Hoult (“About a Boy”) play a couple who do just that. As you can probably imagine, things don’t go quite as planned.
- The movie is said to be an astute commentary on fine dining culture. There’s a lot of ludicrous stuff that happens in the food and drink world, which is often rightly criticized for being exclusive to the point of being discriminatory. “The Menu” is a work of outlandish fiction, but it still leaves viewers with some very real food for thought.
- So how does “The Menu” play into Noma’s closure? Fans have joked that the movie’s release on streaming platforms earlier this month and the announcement of Noma’s closure are a little too coincidental. After all, Noma has been named the best restaurant in the world a whopping five times, most recently in 2021. Surely, it should be able to survive, right? Unfortunately not. Could there be lower footfall at Noma as people’s taste for fine dining dissipates? And could that be down to “The Menu”? Probably not, but some people think so.
- Don’t worry, they’re mostly joking. As one fan quipped on Twitter, “Watching The Menu yesterday and seeing Noma is closing today… hard not to link these two in my mind.” Meanwhile, another person added, “The Menu comes out on HBO Max and a day later the Noma guy announces he is closing the restaurant lol.” A third remarked, “Noma is closing because its labor practices are unsustainable and now I’m down a hole, furiously researching whether The Menu went into production before or after this happened.”
You can watch “The Menu” on HBO Max in the U.S. and Disney+ in the U.K.
