Spoilers ahead for the streaming site’s latest thriller about class in the world of fine dining
It’s been a tumultuous year for fine dining restaurants. Intensive labour, accusations of abusive working conditions, and the pressure to deliver transcendent food daily for an ultra-rich clientele have seen some of the finest dining establishments around the world pull down their shutters. Most shocking of all was Noma, which announced earlier this year that it would be hanging up its knives in 2024, citing the ‘unsustainable’ financial and emotional toll of running the world’s best restaurant.
While shockwaves were rolling throughout the food industry, the rest of the world was grappling with soaring inflation, declining wages, environmental catastrophe, and an impending recession. From this cultural climate sprung a surge of films targeted at critiquing the wealthy, and fine dining was not spared. Most infamous of all is The Menu (2022), an incisive critique of the bastardisation of the culinary arts by the 1 percent.
Enter Hunger (2023), the latest film adding another voice to the clamour. Directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri, the film follows Aoy, a young woman who’s picked up from her mundane life as a cook in her family’s street noodle joint to one of Bangkok’s finest kitchens, Hunger. At the helm is chef Paul, a dictator who controls his brigade with the clockwork precision of the high-powered generals he cooks for. As Aoy delves deeper into the world of fine dining, she is confronted with the toxicities of the industry and the clientele she cooks for.
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As a dining writer I’ve experienced firsthand the luxuries of fine dining and the exclusivity of their price point—opportunities that would have been inaccessible to me elsewhere. It leads me to wonder about the super-rich who can afford these experiences without batting an eyelid. If exclusive luxuries become everyday mundanities, how much do they really appreciate fine dining?
Chef Paul’s pessimistic answer is this: they don’t. He tells Aoy bluntly, ‘What you eat represents your social status, not your love.’ His clientele includes insufferable influencers who are more interested in bragging about hiring him as a private chef rather than appreciating his artistry. It’s why he calls his restaurant Hunger—it’s meant for a class of rapacious individuals whose hunger for status, power and capital will never end. Mongkolsiri is not shy in hammering this point across; whenever we see the rich eat Paul’s food, they are reduced to primal animals with juices running down their chins, losing all inhibitions and dignity.
