The Menu, Binging with Babish, and Ornamental Cookery
Half a year ago, I watched The Menu, which is a delightful film if you haven't seen it. Depending on your perspective, you might read its whip-smart commentary as a critique on fine-dining culture, an examination of the cultish qualities of class warfare, a deconstruction of the relationship between artist, audience and financier, all of these, or more that I haven't mentioned. And yet, despite the roiling thematic depths, it's a very accessible and entertaining social horror flick. That was six months ago. And today, I got recommended a video called "Binging with Babish: Cheeseburger from The Menu." In the video, YouTuber Andrew "Babish" Rea attempts to replicate the final dish in The Menu (spoilers ahead): a cheeseburger which is only special, in the film, for its simplicity. For the fact that it is food meant to be eaten and enjoyed, not to be part of some absurd navel-gazing ritual. And for the first part of the video, Babish, in my opinion, replicates the burger near perfectly. A simple burger, on a premade bun, with deli American cheese and crinkle-cut fries. No frills; no fancy tricks. A burger you or I would make, executed well, designed to be eaten and enjoyed. By the time he's done tasting this burger, we're two minutes and fifteen seconds into an eleven minute video.
Roland Barthes (look, just bear with me please) was a French critic who is now best known for his seminal 1967 essay "The Death of the Author." But my favourite of his works is his 1957 essay collection "Mythologies." In the economic boom that followed World War II, Barthes looked around at a new emerging popular culture, and chronicled what he felt were the artistic, philosophical and political connotations of everything from wrestling to the recipes in women's magazines. In the latter essay, titled "Ornamental Cookery," Barthes described the difference between recipes in the working-class Elle Magazine, and the middle class L'Express. Barthes observed that food in Elle was fancy, aesthetically pleasing, and tremendously complex to make, with garnishes and glazes and bright colors, in contrast to the simpler food in the apprently classier L'Express. Explaining this seeming contradiction, Barthes writes,
It is because Elle is addressed to a genuinely working-class public that it is very careful not to take for granted that cooking must be economical. Compare with L'Express, whose exclusively middle-class public enjoys a comfortable purchasing power: its cookery is real, not magical... The readers of Elle are entitled only to fiction; one can suggest real dishes to those of L'Express, in the certainty that they will be able to prepare them.
In other words, Barthes thinks that the recipes in Elle are there not to be made, but to be observed and hungered for by a working class that would struggle to afford the expensive ingredients for complex home cooking, whereas middle-class cooks were capable of affording the ingredients for recipes that could plausibly be made, and so had no need for spectacle or impractical flights of culinary fancy.
This same dynamic can be observed in cooking videos on YouTube. Videos like the aforementioned Babish video, where, after completing his simple, delicious burger, Babish spends hours making his own buns, synthesizing American cheese, crinkle-cutting fries, and grinding expensive steaks to form his patties. The resultant burger, again, looks delicious. But, compared with the first burger, while it's something that I, a middle class woman, certainly could make, the cheaper, simpler burger is infinitely more practical (and, I would argue, more aligned with the themes of The Menu). This isn't a phenomenon unique to the Babish video, either. It's a dichotomy I've observed in lots of cooking videos; some of which, like those made by J. Kenji Lopez, Adam Ragusea, and the like are designed to be practical, replicable recipes; some of which, like Joshua Weissman's "But Better" series, or this delightful video from YouTuber ANTI-CHEF, are videos meant to be consumed as entertainment, only nominally replicable by a typical home cook. The Elle Magazine of today. Not that there's anything wrong with art for art's sake, food designed to be viewed as much as or more than it is to be eaten. Is there?
If, in 1957, you had a lot of money, want to eat the elaborate dishes on display in Elle, and couldn't cook, there was an easy way to do it. You could hire a chef. You could ask them to make some pink, glazed, mythical dish, or, hell, you could let them dazzle you with their creativity instead. You could let them set The Menu, so to speak. But maybe what that film argues is that perhaps the thing you would be consuming would still be ephemeral, unsatisfying, perhaps even unhealthy to eat. Maybe, when we watch videos about impractical, spectacular dishes; when we delight in the excesses of fine dining on display in Chef's Table or the excesses of home cooking in Binging with Babish, we are aligning our expectations, however minutely, along an unwholesome vision of what food should be.
I just rewatched The Menu on the plane and I loved the movie and I love this writeup of it! I do think that the movie itself has so many different layers and interpretations that you can go over.
As for your analysis, I can definitely see what you're saying! I think Chef in the movie even sums up his menu as ephemeral and chides the guests for ruining his life and his craft being almost forced to go even further and further with his menu. You can see it in the rich couple characters, that have been to his restaurant so many times yet are unable to remember a single dish they've consumed, maybe a small nod to the fact that we can watch so many videos of fine dining and never really appreciate any of the actual food, just the spectacle of it.
When I watched the movie, my first reaction of it was to compare it to the film industry as a whole, but I feel like it says a lot of just the commodification of art in general.
Yeah, and one thing I didn't get to here was the role of capital, but we definitely see that dynamic in The Menu and Barthes' essay. Why, fundamentally, does Ralph Fiennes's character experience this culinary scope creep? Why does Elle contain mythical dishes instead of frugal, practical ones? Not just because people demand it (though of course, they do to an extent) but because investors and owners have decided it's what must be done. When the Hawthorne investor, dressed as an angel (a fitting mythological framing), is drowned it is a rejection of the incentive structure that has warped the chef's art, but only at the end of the movie does the chef also see rejection of the extravagant ethos that that incentive structure has created. Actually in this respect the YouTubers are fundamentally different from the Chef or the magazine writers. Unlike those culinary artists, they are guided not by editorial control and pure profit motive, but by an algorithm that they don't really have to try to appease if they don't want to.
The restaurant itself running on a no tip structure I think says something to it too, that they are proud of their work despite all of it?
I've noticed this trend of watching consumptive media like cooking on Youtube and TikTok tends to go one of two ways. The Kenji Lopez/Adam Ragusea type of cooking that is educational and meant to impart some understanding of technique, science, or history on the viewer. The other trend is kind of hard to describe without being crass. I would describe it as a sort of voyeuristic cooking cuckoldry where your not meant to participate. In fact the actual intention is to be entertained by someone else doing the cooking and eating the food. I don't think there is anything inherently harmful about this I can't help but feel that it's a reflection of trend in western society as whole. More and more entertainment and hobbies is becoming about enjoying watching others do things instead of doing them yourselves. I don't know if it comes from the growing epidemic of porn addictions or just general societal malaise but I absolutely hate it. I want to try new recipes and learn new techniques. I don't want to watch someone make something pretty but ultimately decorative. I want to get better at cooking and make things that taste good and are meant to be shared with the people I love. Anything else to me is useless filler.
Like most things, the internet, and social media more specifically, ruins everything. There is a sea of "cooking for entertainment" videos out there now, most of which are just awful. Every time I find myself scrolling through random feeds/videos I inevitably get shown:
Videos of girls with shirts that are obviously meant to show off their cleavage with the camera pointed exactly there. They usually cook really sloppy, amateur recipes, or extremely simple recipes that don't even require a video to learn how to do it.
The flashy trick videos where every movement has to be fancy and quick and exaggerated. You don't screw off a cap from a jar, you spin it and shoot it off frame somewhere onto the floor for some reason. Catch an onion by piercing it on the knife, smack all ingredients down on the cutting board. Cut multiple steps into one second using extremely fast and almost nauseating edits. The recipes are either outrageous like deep frying every damn thing possible or just whatever is trending at the moment.
The 'tude personalities. They curse a lot or try to make as many jokes as possible. Recipes vary a lot but they are usually very amateurly put together.
The westerner that thinks they have discovered an exclusive secret by using eastern ingredients like miso, gochujang, MSG or foods with high amounts of glutamate, sesame oil, chili oil, etc. It's not like those ingredients/techniques have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years or anything...
The annoying buzzword user. Everything has to be elevated, or slap, or deconstructed, etc.
Rage inducers. They make recipes that would never taste good to anyone on the planet and use a ton of ingredients that not even 20 people would be able to finish (also cause it's so disgusting) just to get people to comment on their videos and get their metrics up. I'm 99.99% sure all that "food" they make goes in the trash after the video is done because it looks inedible and I'm sure they don't care as long as they make money from the views.
Just plain not-great videos. Either their mic is barely audible, the video quality is poor, and/or their cooking skills are not that great yet. I know everyone has to start somewhere but it doesn't add much to what's already out there.
Sigh, I really gotta stop browsing random reels/shorts.
There's a sort of core contradiction to cooking YouTube in that food is something that's meant to be eaten. So what happens when you can't eat the food? On YouTube, it mostly filters into that dichotomy you laid out. Either it communicates a recipe that's actually practical, so that you can actually taste the food that's on the screen, or it maximizes the visual spectacle of it all, so that it's fun to watch, regardless of our ability to eat the food.
I do think it's hilarious just how much Babish's video misses the point of The Menu, especially when said point is as ham
fistedmered home as it is.He actually makes two videos about the film, the other recreating "Tyler's Bullshit." First he badly chops shallots and undercooks lamb in an ocean of butter to recreate the inedible dish from the film, then he tries to "make it good" by using the same ingredients but cooking them well. I want to be careful with my words here because I'm sure Andrew is a lovely guy, but watching both of his The Menu videos was a genuinely bewildering experience, to the point where I'm almost tempted to read them as straight-faced self-satire. The Menu, for all its charms, is not exactly subtle, so I find it kind of bizarre that what he's done with the text is mine it in order to make his usual content without asking "does it make sense to engage with the film in this way?" Of course, again, it's dangerous to try to analyze an artist's intentions instead of their actual work, but with videos like these it's hard not to wonder "what was he thinking?"
I would hasten to add that Babish (and Joshua Weissman, I can't comment on the others) do have editors and writers for their content. I have always gotten the impression though that both of their operations are not nearly big or complex enough that they do not examine and read through scripts, especially since both of them do voice-over for most of the actual preparation steps.
It did strike me as very odd that Babish did not sufficiently address the point the movie was trying to drive home. I'm not a chef (and apparently neither is Babish) and it was pretty obvious what it wanted to say. I do wonder if it was during a very busy period or something, where he wasn't able to dedicate enough time to it.
Then again, there's another video where he wanted to source cocoa from it's, well, source in Ecuador (he's trying to make chocolate from scratch from SpongeBob). He spends a chunk of the video going there, farming it, learning how to turn it into a useable chocolate... Only to find out he can't bring it back to the US with him, so he ends up using cocoa beans he bought online. It feels weirdly tone-deaf and just odd as the video is a celebration of 10 million subscribers, but he clearly just wasted a bunch of money to learn something he could probably learn locally using ingredients he ended up leaving at his hotel. So there's a part of me that thinks maybe he did just niss the point of it all.
This is an interesting perspective. I'm an avid home cook and have been a fan of Top Chef since season 1, watched/read just about everything Anthony Bourdain has ever made/written, greatly enjoy fine dining and whimsical dining and street food dining. And I'm in that L'Express socioeconomic standing where I can afford the fancy food stuffs and kitchen gadgetry, but I want to try and make the more intricate, time consuming, and "chefy" stuff.
But I supposed when it comes down to it, the majority of the time I will pick the simpler option when given the choice.
Haven’t watched The Menu yet, I’ll definitely check it out. Seems right up my alley.
I think the issue with YouTubers is that at some point, you’ll run out of ‘actual’ recipes. The algorithm needs to be fed every week or every few days by uploading a video that people will click on and watch long enough. After you’ve made all of the traditional dishes, you’ll have to look for something else interesting. The point you make about it being just entertainment I haven’t thought of before but I think it is very true.
What helped bring me back to earth a bit is realizing all of these big chefs or names in the retaurant world eat just like I do. A simple burger is good enough. Grilled cheese late at night. Dried pasta is perfectly fine, maybe even better than fresh. Watching Anthony Bourdain and Kenji Lopez-Alt, for example, really changed my perspective.
For sure! One thing you'll notice if you spend a lot of time on food YouTube is that a TON of recipes vids are no joke just people talking you through recipes in The Food Lab. Which is fine, they're great recipes. But noticing that gave me a lot more confidence to just do my own thing in the kitchen, enjoy making simpler meals, and just get in there and cook instead of following some regurgitated recipe to the letter
There's a slightly old-ish video by Dan Olson (Folding Ideas) that examines a fair amount of the implicit "why would you do that" questions I often had when I was watching food-tube, that may help inform this - part of the difficult part of recording content for video based consumption is that a lot of food that tastes really good, also looks terrible under anything less than really good lighting. There's so many additional steps to take to not only be able to film, but also to be able to film in a manner that's presentable (let alone one that matches viewer expectations from a "food-tube video" culturally) that it becomes much much safer to cook and present known filmable and safe recipes than to reinvent another part of the wheel.