 There’s something everyone loves about being tucked away with friends or a partner, enjoying your meal, when drama erupts in a restaurant. The kind of scene where you lean in, pretend to keep eating, but your eyes won’t leave the action. Enjoy Your Meal is exactly that experience, except here, you’re not overhearing it but living it.
We descend into the basement space at Summerhall and are greeted by our host: the Chef, played by Cory Calvin. He’s lean, with unruly red hair, his face growing redder and slicker with sweat as the “service” unfolds. It’s a dishevelled, almost chaotic look that feels pitch-perfect for the character and instantly telling us this is a man teetering between control and collapse. That lived-in disarray makes him all the more believable as a chef in the middle of a high-pressure, rapidly deteriorating night. After he shares his culinary inspirations from the fire of Gordon Ramsay to the larger-than-life, all-American energy of Guy Fieri the cracks are already showing. The gas supply is broken. The desserts are missing because the owners haven’t paid the suppliers, let alone today’s head chef The service and kitchen is in freefall. It’s impossible not to draw comparisons with Stephen Graham’s gripping Boiling Point, where the tension in a restaurant kitchen simmers, boils, and then spills over. Calvin captures that same balance between barely controlled professionalism and utter disaster, pulling us into a pressure-cooker atmosphere where even an egg yolk could push everything over the edge. In fact, it’s remarkable how quickly he can, with just a few eggs, plunge an entire room into a state of tension for the hour. There’s also a strong echo of the Safdie Brothers’ work such as Uncut Gems where the chaos is so immersive you find yourself holding your breath in our case whenever the Chef pikes up a knife or a bottle of gin. Even when nothing is visibly going wrong, you feel that at any moment it could, and that tension is as intoxicating as it is exhausting. It’s theatre as endurance sport: you keep thinking, “What’s going to go wrong next?” and almost dread finding out especially for a Chef we are rooting for. Enjoy Your Meal is a razor-sharp, brilliantly executed piece of immersive theatre that hurtles toward a deeply rewarding finale. It’s a clever, high-stakes concept from Cory Calvin, and while Chef’s fictional service collapses in front of us, the production itself is an absolute triumph that is funny, insightful, fraught, and unforgettable. Lee Hutchison 5/5 Enjoy Your Meal Venue: Former Womens Locker Room at Summerhall Dates: August 8th - 25th (excluding 11th and 18th) Time: 1920 Tickets: www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/enjoy-your-meal |
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