The Menu: Ending Explained | How The Final Dish Changed Everything

The Menu has been a great movie all around, with intriguing plot lines, great performances and a pretty wild ending. If you're not quite show you completely got everything, here is The Menu: Ending Explained.

The menu
The Menu's ending needs some explaining | © Searchlight Pictures

The Menu was one of the best movies that graced the big screen in 2022. Director Mark Mylod and writers Will Tracy & Seth Reiss, as well as the whole cast and production crew, truly delivered what was one of the most entertaining and intriguing movies in recent history. The Menu has a lot of deep themes and a rather ambiguous ending, so we took it upon ourselves to explain it to you.

We follow our main protagonist Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) as she is dropped into a setting full of pretentious food critics, pampered investment bankers, and snobbish rich folks. Not to forget her overzealous date (Nicholas Hoult) for the evening, who's always just a little too into the dish at hand. And then there is the eccentric celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) who, from the very beginning, appears to be irritated because of Margot's presence.

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Throughout the film, Margot feels out of place in the setting of the extravagant island restaurant, a feeling that permeated the entire movie and becomes a key component for the movie's climax.

The rest of the article will obviously contain spoilers for the movie, so you should online read it if you've seen the movie! Here is The Menu's ending explained.

The Menu Explained | How The Ending Ties Everything Together

The Menu is a pretty intelligent and self-aware satire, that pokes fun at the self-important consumerism in modern society, providing social commentary Karl Marx style by pitting the chef's staff against the decadent guests of the restaurant.

The movie is split into several parts that correlate to the different courses of the menu, which peel back the layers of the plot dish by dish until it becomes a violent outburst.

The menu margot
The Menu made me hungry | © Searchlight Pictures

The movie does a great job showing the decades of repressed hate against the shallow, disconnected and self-serving elite, which pushed the staff so far as to go on a full-blown Kamikaze mission to get revenge under Slowok's lead.

Slowik seems to be inspired by the real-life chef Marco Pierre White, who was furious at the idea of being judged by people less knowledgeable than he was. Sounds familiar? Throughout the movie, Slowik made sure to put the guests, and even the food critic that “made him” into their place. The best example of this was when he humiliated Tyler for his lack of cooking skills, despite his pretentious attitude.

The menu overall is a movie about classicism, about a person losing passion and getting his revenge on those who took it from him. People who make the special ordinary through their decadent lifestyle, being completely disconnected from the authentic human experience. Think about it: Slowik went from cooking basic cheeseburgers to creating all these extravagant dishes we can see in the movie, only for his guests to treat it as something trivial.

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Kind of interesting how in the end, something as trivial as a cheeseburger was the last dish Slowik cooked with passion. But it is exactly that simplicity that brings back Slowik's joy and reminds him of the time he still enjoyed cooking for customers and wasn't driven by the ever-increasing expectations.

Regarding the ending, Mark Mylod explained to Den of Geek, how it is not about Slowik being manipulated by Margot, but instead how "He also realized that she’s manipulating him, but he allows her to win. All the unspoken business is in the final discourse between them and the burger."

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Robert Bachhuber

As a master graduate of sociology who wrote his thesis about Twitch, Robert knows a fair share about streaming. Adding to that, he loves binge-watching TV shows, so he got entertainment covered....