‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ Review: Frederick Wiseman Feasts at Length on Culinary Process and Pleasure

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s the quiet that strikes you in “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” a documentary rejoinder to every image of cacophonous haute cuisine environments — complete with clattering pans, hissing steam and chefs screaming invective — that has been fed to us by “Hell’s Kitchen”-style reality shows and the propulsive drama of “The Bear.” Serenity reigns in Frederick Wiseman’s languidly mesmerising 240-minute anatomy of one of the world’s greatest restaurants: The masters and staff of Le Bois Sans Feuilles, a three Michelin-star establishment in France’s Loire region, work with a hushed intensity of concentration that recalls a science lab, or a surgery table, more than any standard kitchen.

That suits Wiseman, a patient, rigorous examiner of institutional structure and process, who observes this culinary cathedral as seriously and methodically as he has such comparatively vast cultural hives as London’s National Gallery or the New York Public Library. “Menus-Plaisirs” also extends a rarefied subset of Wiseman’s oeuvre that explores temples of French culture, high and low, from the inside out: File it somewhere between his erotic cabaret study “Crazy Horse” and his Paris Opera Ballet ode “La Danse.” Viewers daunted in theory by four hours of (mostly) men in white assembling sweetbreads with tweezers or debating the correct balance of flavor between chili pepper and passion fruit will probably find their fears realized; others may wish to show up with a notepad and pen for all the exquisite recipes dished out in passing.

That gourmand hook could make this the director’s most readily distributable work in some time, albeit on an epicurean scale.