‘The Dinner’ is a diabolical pairing of food & murder

If you lose your appetite during this film, it won’t be because of the food. Blame the plot. In “The Dinner” — in theaters Friday and based on a novel by Herman Koch — two estranged brothers (Richard Gere and Steve Coogan) and their wives (Laura Linney and Rebecca Hall) meet at a fancy restaurant in the suburbs to discuss a gruesome crime their teenage sons committed. The evening starts with pleasantries exchanged over an aperitif in the ornate dining room, but by the time the appetizers roll out, tensions rise, and more disturbing details — and clues — are unearthed with every mouthwatering course. “Throughout the meal, we’re hinting at what’s happening,” Jae Song, a restaurant consultant for the film, tells the Daily News. “We really wanted to bring out another layer of the motives and themes.”

The menu — which is part French, part farm-to-table inspired — was designed to play on ideas of youth, defense and ultimately murder.

The characters are “all acting on this need to protect their children,” says Song, who represented this idea through foods with shells.

There’s a decadent white chocolate egg melting to reveal a parsnip cake and grapefruit inside in the opening credits.

Later, the head waiter (Michael Chernus) presents the first dish, a “garden of young vegetables” — carrots, radishes, wild fennel and turnips dusted in pink Himalayan salt — to represent the kids.

Aside from in flashbacks, the teens are not present at the dinner, but the subject of youth is echoed again when the waiter returns to serve the young winter roots appetizer, another baby vegetable medley that features “burnt pumpernickel soil” (bread heated with a blowtorch), which is meant to foreshadow a horrific fire that ignites later in the film.

Dessert is petit fours — bite-sized confectionaries — splattered with raspberry syrup that resembles blood.

You know what comes next.

“We were basically making a crime scene,” says Song.

While Chernus’ waiter is a pro in the film, the actor has never worked in a restaurant.

“I’m one of the few characters in New York who avoided having to be a waiter as a day job,” says Chernus, who geared up for the role by reading restaurateur

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Danny Meyer’s book, “Setting the Table.”

Chernus’ best scene is when he recites a monologue about a mimolette — a hard, tangerine-colored French cheese that was almost banned by the Food and Drug Administration due to potential health hazards because of all the cheese mites that makers purposely leave on the surface of the product during its aging process.

“But we have it for you tonight,” the waiter proudly boasts in the movie.

Chernus, 39, actually improved the entire scene.

“I Googled that. That’s all real,” he says of the cheese trivia.

His character gets plenty of flak from Coogan’s character, who corrects the waiter multiple times for minor details like where the herbs in the specials are from.

The bad behavior has given Chernus — who lives in Brooklyn and prefers a more casual dining atmosphere — a renewed respect for all the nonsense servers deal with while waiting tables.

“They (waiters) have to put up with so much garbage,” Chernus says. “People think the price on the menu gives you the right to be a jerk.”