You need an appetite for this over-the-top dinner

MAURA JUDKIS

WASHINGTON: The Dinner, starring Richard Gere and Steve Coogan, is about a serious conversation that takes place in a restaurant with silly food. Or, at least, that’s how some might see it.

The restaurant is an object of mockery for its over-the-top presentations, like this description of one course from the maitre d’hotel (head waiter): “The ladies are having our young winter roots. There are chioggia beets, Thumbelina carrots and purple radish that’s served with a goat cheese and smoked herring vinaigrette. There’s also a few charred leeks, radicchio, blood orange, and it’s sprinkled with a burnt pumpernickel soil.”

But jokes about pumpernickel soil might hit a little too close to home in their imitation of other full- of- themselves dining destin- ations where reservations take months to acquire and every course comes with a small dissertation on the food.

Director and screenwriter Oren Moverman wanted “to create a place that was absurd, but just plausible enough that it exists”, he said, taking inspiration, in part from chef Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns. “We talked about an eccentric billionaire that was going to have a restaurant that would be curated on every level.”

The film, adapted from a Dutch novel, tackles the family dynamics between two brothers who have come to the restaurant to figure out the path forward after they discover their sons have committed a terrible crime.

The book was published in 2009, and when Moverman adapted it, he brought along the descriptions of the dishes, pretty much verbatim.

But the descriptions of the dishes, from an overzealous maitre d’hotel played by Michael Chernus, are built up for comedic effect. Like the cheese course, for which Chernus’s character delivers a monologue, in the vein of every overzealous waiter you wish would just go away.

Some of the dishes at the fictional restaurant seem a little overdone. Like the “melting chocolate egg with parsnip cake and grapefruit on Brazil nuts, with edible flowers and mint…” No wonder Hall’s character sends it back to the kitchen.

“That restaurant is a joke,” says Coogan’s character, who, at one point, asks, “Can we just go out and get pizza?” – Washington Post

The Dinner. Steve Coogan, Laura Linney, Richard Gere and Rebecca Hall in