#‘Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros’ Review: Frederick Wiseman’s Four-Hour Doc Is a Mouth-Watering and Methodical Marathon for Foodies

The venerable documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who’s 93 years old and still going strong, is known for his sprawling, compassionate and hard-hitting works chronicling American institutions for more than half a century. Films like Welfare, High School, Public Housing, Law and Order, Domestic Violence and Belfast, Maine captured the inner workings of various public bodies, whether schools, offices, communities or entire cities, and the people keeping them afloat. Often clocking in at three hours or more, his movies are loaded with the bureaucratic details and the minutiae of everyday life, painting an ever-evolving portrait of America in all its complex, paradoxical glory.

Starting in the 1990s, Wiseman began making films in France, which is now his adopted home. But rather than focusing on the country’s many public bureaucracies, which can be more intimidating and Kafkaesque than those in the U.S., he’s chosen to document a number of its famed cultural institutions, from the Comédie-Française to the Opéra de Paris to the popular nude cabaret, the Crazy Horse. Compared to his American movies — the most recent of which, City Hall, was a deep dive into Boston’s progressive urban agenda — his French ones are altogether more, well, epicurean.

That’s certainly the case with Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros, a 240-minute immersion inside one of France’s, and the world’s, finest restaurants, which has been run by the same close-knit family over four consecutive generations. Set in the kitchens, dining rooms and neighboring farms of a mouth-watering Michelin 3-star establishment nestled in the bucolic Loire region, the film is both a food lover’s dream and an aspiring chef’s guidebook, uncovering the sophisticated alchemy that makes such places not only run flawlessly, but serve up groundbreaking dishes that are also locally sourced.

The Troisgros family was at the forefront of the nouvelle cuisine movement that arose in France in the 1960s and 70s, when young chefs moved away from the heavy sauces and dishes of traditional haute cuisine to serve up leaner, more artfully presented plats that brought out the strong flavors of fresh ingredients. Pierre Troisgros, who took over the original restaurant from his father, Jean-Pierre, in the late 1950s, was one of nouvelle cuisine’s key players. His son, Michel, carried on that tradition into the present day, and in the film we see him working alongside his son, César, who has since taken over.

None of this is initially clear from Wiseman’s typical fly-on-the-wall approach, which provides no titles or talking-head interviews, inviting the viewer to watch and learn. A few explanations about the restaurant’s history do come, but almost at the four-hour mark! It’s as if the director were purposely telling us to sit back, relax and smell the hot-pepper-and-passion-fruit-infused sweetbreads, instead of asking too many questions. 

The doc oscillates between the latest iteration of Troisgros, opened by Michel and his wife, Marie-Pierre, in 2017, and poetically called the Le Bois sans feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), and scenes set at the neighboring farms where they procure the produce, meat, cheese and wine that are served up on a nightly basis by their elite chefs.

As in most Wiseman films, we get to witness every stage of the process. This includes long and passionate debates between Michel, César and youngest brother Léo (who runs a more modest establishment nearby) about a new recipe — should the rhubarb be marinated in elderberry sauce, or not? — as well as visits to suppliers providing them with all their ingredients. Troisgros is both a family and a farm-to-table business, entailing a very intricate, human supply chain where everyone knows everyone by their first name, and where biodiverse, organic farming methods are l’ordre du jour.

This comes at a certain cost, of course — something we learn about when the restaurant’s sommelier, who looks and acts like a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, mentions preselling a bottle of wine for 15,000 Euros ($16,000). Almost all the people we see eating at Le Bois sans feuilles are wealthy-looking older white folks, and a dinner for four can easily run into the thousands, wine included. The attention paid to their every dietary need is something to behold, reminiscent of the recent episode of The Bear set in an upscale Chicago restaurant that obtained FBI-level intel on each client.  

And yet, despite all the excessive demands, the Troisgros kitchen isn’t filled with pretentious screaming French chefs like the ones in Ratatouille, but functions more like a high-tech laboratory where voices are rarely raised and perfection is all that matters. Creativity is also abundant. The cooks do things with melted chocolate or fresh fish or brains from some kind of small animal that don’t seem humanly possible, honing their techniques through careful guidance and the steady accumulation of experience. Watching the Troisgros men work the kitchen — or, as Michel calls it, “my little tennis court” — is like watching athletes at the top of their game perform in the Olympics, with the dozen chefs who labor alongside them always trying to keep up.

Beyond the abundant food porn — though this is a Wiseman doc, so the food is shot matter-of-factly by DP James Bishop, and not like the dishes on Top Chef — Menus Plaisirs (the title is a pun that means both “pleasure menu” and “tiny pleasures”) leaves us, perhaps most of all, with an image of harmonic bliss between work and home, man and nature, that hardly seems possible nowadays. “It’s been 86 years,” Michel tells a client toward the close of the film, tracing back his family’s culinary roots to the start. Wiseman’s first feature, Titticut Follies, was made exactly 66 years ago, and there’s something about his latest that speaks to the kind of savoir-faire that only time can give you.