Uniting every Asian culture is a great love for food and a passion for eating. But how many people really stop to consider the deeper meaning behind what and how we eat? Our national dishes come with so many of the ideologies and aspirations of our societies that eating is never a neutral act. Neither are those who prepare food or those who consume ever truly free from these values.
In recent years, films like The Menu (2022) and The Platform (2019) have peeled back the dark connection between the politics of food and the power dynamics of eating. Closer to home, the Thai film Hunger (2023) cut open the dark heart of celebrity chef culture, worker abuse, and elite dining. Now, another distinctly Asian production has joined the banquet: Vietnam’s Devil’s Diner.
Directed by Ham Tran, Devil’s Diner is a horror anthology that serves up tales of desire and karmic reckoning with uniquely Vietnamese flavours. Each of the six episodes pairs a carnal human sin with a local dish. We’re treated to strange and dreamlike combinations such as greed and blood pudding, delusion and candied gooseberries, suspicion and heart porridge, and moon-faced snails with karma (these pairings also form the delightful title of each episode).
The series’ narrative format sounds like the set-up for a joke: in each episode, an emotionally beaten person walks into a diner. The bartender/chef asks them to share their problems. After listening patiently, he offers to cook them a special meal. If they can finish eating it, their greatest wish shall be granted. The only payment is their soul, which the bartender collects to pay his own debt to the diner’s demonic owner.
While the bartender, played by Lê Quốc Nam with both a sparkle in his eye and genuine remorse for his patrons, is the one constant character, there is no doubt that the extraordinary dishes he prepares are the standout characters. The elaborate care, attention to aesthetics, presentational detail, and showmanship he lavishes on each dish would make Julian Slowik, the diabolical master chef of The Menu, deeply proud.
For example, in Episode 1, a penniless husband, Luan, feasts on chicken blood pudding and crushed nuts served in a whimsical egg-shaped bowl. As a reward for finishing this meal, the bartender gives Luan a crying box that grants unimaginable riches. Although it’s never spelt out explicitly, I’m convinced the box is haunted by something like a kuman thong, and it is deeply freaky.
Naturally, there is no such thing as a free meal in life and every gift has its price. The box’s demonic baby feeds on blood as payment. Just like the box’s bottomless appetite, Luan’s craving for money spirals and the box starts feeding on more than just blood. The metaphors are unmissable: beware of the insatiable hunger for wealth, which is endless and can never be fulfilled. Those afflicted with the sin of greed will find themselves eaten in the end.
Unlike so many other stories about deals with the devil, what makes Devil’s Diner refreshing is that the bartender/chef is fully upfront with each person he cuts a deal with. None of his patrons are ignorant about the terms and conditions they are entering into. Maybe that’s what makes things so much more tragic: taking a bite of the proverbial forbidden fruit, each patron is a willing participant in their own self-damnation in this life and beyond.
Each dish served is unique to the eater and conveys a pointedly Vietnamese understanding of the world, both this Earthly one and those to come. Steeping the series so deeply in Vietnamese culture was a gamble that paid off. An international, especially a Western audience, may find the series’ Buddhist cosmology and conception of sin, Nirvana and higher realms, a little hard to digest, but surely anyone can relate to the series’ universal themes of human struggle and desire to free ourselves.
Devil’s Diner may be fairly predictable, but the finale closes with a surprise visitor when one of the bartender/chef’s victims comes looking for answers. The final dish, melon leaves with a chance at forgiveness and freedom, may prove that revenge really is a dish best served cold. In this place, the dinner plate is a battleground for good against evil and where the cultural and the personal mesh with every mouthful.
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