Palate, the Restaurant in DROP, Reviewed
I couldn't talk about the movie in serious fashion, but the restaurant? Sure.
Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to see the new Christopher Landon thriller DROP, per the suggestion of my lovely girlfriend and fellow cinephile, Meredith. We pitched the idea to our friend Jack, somebody who frequently catches movies with us, to join but he proclaimed that he couldn’t be paid to attend. Meredith and I are perhaps less snobby than Jack when it comes to movies; both she and I are willing to go into most films with an open heart and genuinely do try our best to see a large majority of new releases if we are able to, even if we expect going in something might not be for us. I’ve (regrettably) found myself seated in theaters watching COCAINE BEAR and FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S. I understand every movie cannot be CASABLANCA, nor would I want every movie to be; that would make the CASABLANCAs of the world less special, after all.
Jack’s instincts may have been the right read, unfortunately.
DROP isn’t even an awful film, to be fair, but it certainly isn’t a good or competent one, either. It’s often lit like a Hyundai commercial (a Hyundai commercial for the Super Bowl, maybe, but a Hyundai commercial, nonetheless), has mostly anonymous actors, and breaks one of my most fundamental film rules: Heavy use of modern technology. None of that was my biggest gripe with DROP, though:
My biggest gripe was the setting, the restaurant Palate. As somebody who has been a server and bartender for, at this point, a decade of my life, the utter ridiculousness of everything going on in this “screenplay” at this “restaurant” was so utterly nonsensical I felt like I had morphed into CinemaSins’ own Jeremy Scott. CinemaSins is a format for reviewing movies that typically isn’t quite my speed, so I try to refrain from talking about movies in that fashion, but I find the goings-on at Palate so absurd I simply have to exorcise my thoughts and feelings about it somewhere.
Let me get my bonafides out of the way before we begin: I currently work at two relatively nice restaurants in Manhattan. The first is one of the most historic and renowned restaurants in the city and the other is a new spot that you can currently find on the Michelin guide. I’ve worked at college bars, middle-to-upscale spots, extremely luxurious and pricey, and everything in between, but I have a pretty sturdy foundation for how restaurants run and function, especially very nice ones. Palate seems like the type of place where you'd spend about $300 on a dinner for two (let’s say both members of the meal have two drinks) before the tip; this isn’t a cheap spot!
Right off the jump, as soon as our protagonist, Violet, arrives at Palate, a restaurant on the 38th floor of a skyscraper with massive wide-open windows overlooking the city of Chicago, there are concerns instantly. Now look, the complaint I’m about to voice is something I notice in movies and TV shows regularly whenever a character arrives at a restaurant, but typically the rest of the dining experience is standard fare. This is normally something I let go very quickly (because in most movies, most scenes at a dinner table are NORMAL!!), but instantly, when Violet arrives at the host stand, there is only one host! From the appearance of this establishment, this place could easily serve 160 people (maybe more!) all at once. In both of my jobs, at any given time, we have at least three hosts and often five hosts (!!) running the joint (one of my places could easily fit 160 people at once, one could fit about 95 at any time, but both are always loaded up on hosts).
Now look, it’s a movie… I’m not going to lambast a movie for getting the typical amount of hosts at a very nice restaurant wrong… usually… but then DROP also gets everything else about the happenings of a restaurant wrong, too, so I have to mention it, Also, the lone hostess (not a maître d’ even? In the movie everybody refers to her as a hostess and if she’s a maître d’, that is a bit disrespectful, but I digress) takes our protagonist’s coat but never gives her a numbered ticket to pick it up at the end of the night. Being obsessed with this level of detail wouldn't make DROP good (movies would be bad if they were this obsessed with true-to-life details and I know that), but it’s not like the quality of this film would be further hurt by an actress saying “And give this to me at the end of the night to pick your coat up.”. When a movie is set in a restaurant for 95% of the film, it doesn’t hurt to get easy details marginally right!
Upon departing from the host stand (the host escorts Violet into the restaurant through a hallway which feels like twice the length of the track where young college athletes test their 40-yard dash times, which makes the solo host aspect only more amusing) and grabbing a drink at the bar before her date arrives (most very very nice restaurants, like Palate poses as, do not allow patrons to just walk up and order at the bar as that is usually reserved for overflow seating when tables are unavailable because of reservations), things are mostly normal at this bar but I did find one detail particularly disturbing:
Most bars typically have fruit and garnishes for drinks pre-assembled and cut up or stocked and ready to go, as a means to quickly decorate any cocktail upon completion for the server. Depending on the size of the bar, there may be more than one drink assembly station, too! For bars with more than 12 seats, you’ll typically find two stations stocked with lemon wheels and lime twists and orange peels and the like! In nicer bars, you’ll often see pre-stabbed olives for martinis, even. Now, at Palate for whatever reason, it appeared like between every three seats (of what I would estimate is a 18-seat circular bar) there was a martini glass of just pre-skewered olives! That, to my eye, seems deranged! Oftentimes, these pre-skewered olives weren’t quite in the vicinity of any drink assembly station! Is the implication here that only martinis are assembled anywhere at the bar, almost haphazardly and right in front of the guests!? Or is the idea here that guests are just grabbing and gobbling up olive skewers as a treat? These aren’t peanuts and there are no baseball games being played here, to my understanding, so what is going on? Ludicrous set design, to be honest!
Eventually, Violet makes it over to her table and her date, Henry (the actor playing him, Brandon Sklenar, gives easily the strongest performance of the movie), makes it to the dinner. Eventually, their server bumbles his way to the table and greets them. I’m not positive if it is a problem with the screenplay, the direction, the actor, or some combo of two or all of the bunch, but this character is abominable. Flagrantly stinky, even. He’s both unbelievably not funny and also never once sincere or credible as a real server, let alone a real human. After stumbling his way through talking to the duo at the table quickly, he explains that this is his first day on the job.
Now, perhaps that is a half-truth, and this is the server’s (Matt, for what it’s worth) first formal shift on the floor without a trainer, but the way it is made to appear in the movie is that this is the first night that Matt has been in the establishment donning the garb of a service worker. In fact, this appears like the first time Matt has ever served anybody anything. He’s awful! And again, I’ve worked in the restaurant industry for years… there are a LOT of bad servers everywhere… but this would just be remarkably awful. And if this is his actual first day in the restaurant working, he would be followed by a trainer (probably for a week or two, whatever is equivalent to five or six shifts, until he was ready to put on the floor and actually thrown into the fire); no nice and expensive restaurant would be allowing a server like this on the floor anywhere. I understand it’s supposed to be funny or be being played for comedy, but it simply isn’t. And if it isn't going to be funny, it could at least be accurate! Again, I’d prefer funny and inaccurate if I had to choose but it appears like that wasn’t an option, so let’s at least get some details correct.
At some point, the hired pianist playing music in Palate takes song requests and Violet suggests “Baby Shark”... Because she’s a mom (just so you understand the screenplay we are working with here). Anywhere I’ve ever worked that took song requests typically featured a DJ with a laptop playing top 40 hits for drunk “21-year-olds” but maybe at this incredibly expensive and beautiful restaurant, the drunk pianist is just taking requests to play “Baby Shark”! What do I know!?
Because of the concept of the movie (a woman at a restaurant is being harassed by a stranger in the establishment “digi-dropping” her weird pictures and memes and messages threatening her and her child at home), our protagonist eventually reaches some sort of an anxiety climax and goes up to the host stand while the one host is somewhere else and preoccupied (probably just walking guests through the 100-yard hallway or something). Violet, desperate to find some answers about who is harassing her, starts searching through the sole host’s (??) iPad for some answers and for whatever reason, this HOST on this iPad has full access to security cameras to every spot in the restaurant? This might be the most truly goofy aspect of this movie restaurant. Extra pre-stabbed olives around the bar is one thing, but no host has any access to an entire establishment’s security footage! Most hosts can hardly set a proper floor plan for the night, let alone deserve access to security camera footage in a restaurant. Quite simply, there is no way!
The final detail which rubbed me the wrong way was the matter of the shot glasses and again, this detail is going to be super nit-picky and obnoxious but I know I’m correct, so I have to express it... with about 25 or so minutes left in the film, Violet gets up from her table (where she is being served, mind you) and goes up to the bar and orders a round of shots for her and Henry. Now, this type of act would simply never happen in a restaurant that looks like this, in my opinion. Violet and Henry would just order the shots and they would be brought, on a tray, to the table. A guest would never be allowed to just get up and go order with the bar while having an open tab with a server (MAYBE if it was a pool house, but even then, not something that polite society does in restaurants like this) and even if they did, they wouldn’t just be handed shots and the guest be expected to walk them back to the table! This is a fine dining establishment, not a college bar!
But all that aside, Violet gets up and orders shots and the bar. The bartender doesn’t even bat an eye, acting like this is a totally standard order and occurrence at Palate, going as far as pulling out two normal shot glasses that one might find in the dorm room of an undergrad student or at Lisa Vanderpump’s SUR. No nice restaurant actually has true “shot glasses” in house, though, mostly because grown adults sitting down for an expensive dining experience are never predicted to order shots! That’s something 19-year-olds do at their local college bar. I love doing shots and have had my fair share even at age 28, but there is also a time and a place and appropriate spots to do shots at; Palate is NOT one of those places. And if ever anybody did order shots, like Violet did here (insanely), the bartender would pour 2 ounces of the liquor of choice (roughly the size of any standard shot and equivalent to the amount of alcohol found in most cocktails) into a rocks glass neat.You can do a shot from a rocks glass, but for any nice restaurant, that glass always looks nicer and far classier.
I don’t need things to be perfect, truly! Details matter to me but never so much that I’m willing to forgo the quality of the art or allow art to be diminished for the sake of honest specificity (sometimes real life is boring or not nearly as interesting as fiction). I remember in the first season of Hulu’s THE BEAR where Carmy is out back after a long shift, drinking out of a plastic deli cup. It’s a meaningless detail, mostly, but it’s a nice touch! Some people online remarked how true to life it was. Others were bewildered because they had never seen that before, probably because they had never worked in the food-service industry. But chefs and back-of-house employees almost always drink out of deli containers; it’s just something they do. THE BEAR getting that right is a nice detail to be accurate on and shows a level of specificity; it makes it seem as if the creators and the writers have done their research and are handling the material with care and being intentional about getting little things correct. I know that the creative team behind DROP built the entire set from scratch on a massive soundstage and were careful to make it a fully functioning and working restaurant where extras were all eating real food and, as to give things a sense of “realism” and authenticity (which I commend!), but that goes right out the window the minute that everything happening inside the real restaurant is farcical.
In an industry like acting or writing or directing, I find it nonsensical to not be able to get details about restaurants correct since there are a ton of restaurant workers in the arts! Half of my damn coworkers are all aspiring actors or creative types! It’s highly highly unlikely that nobody involved behind the scenes in creating DROP hadn’t at least once in their life worked in a restaurant and had an understanding of how they are operated. It’s lazy and sloppy and maybe it could be excused and it would be all worth it if the big picture coalesced into something compelling despite a lack of attention to detail, but the problem is that DROP wasn’t really interesting and certainly never came close to nailing the bigger picture aspects of the film. The only thing DROP nailed was a detailed guide on how to make the least believable possible restaurant in maybe the history of cinema. If you’re morbidly curious or have consumed two or more margarita towers, you might have a good time at the theater! Otherwise, you’re probably okay to miss it. And if I had to give Palate a formal review, I could make it quite short and simple… in the words of Gordon Ramsay on one of his famous shows, KITCHEN NIGHTMARES:
“Wow. This is dreadful!”
Great critique Mike!!