NYAFF 2026: ‘The Dating Menu’ Review
The relationship between food and love has given rise to some of cinema’s most beautiful depictions of culinary romance. There’s something about the way cooking a meal can express someone’s devotion while also opening them up in vulnerable ways. Even the most guarded individual might reveal something about themselves in how they prepare a simple dish or merely in choosing the right dish for the person they’re cooking for. At home, do you cook a meal simply because you want it, or do you take into account someone else’s desires? And how do those decisions impact your own happiness?
Where Amos Why and Frankie Chung’s The Dating Menu begins is in a place of forced experimentation. Hark Lam (Lo Chun-yip) is a chef who has fallen into a routine where he goes to work at a struggling omakase restaurant and then retires to his van, which doubles as his home. He’s put care into his lifestyle, but it’s one of isolation. Customers complain that he feels unwelcoming when serving food. Compounded with the realities of a post-pandemic economy and his last meaningful relationship being three years ago, it feels like his version of settling may have ramifications on his mental health. When his coworkers and friends set him up with a dating profile, he turns his romantic adventure into a chance to hone his cooking skills by curating meals for each date in search of a long-lost love.
There are many ideas at play in The Dating Menu that hold potential but never truly feel realized. Hark curates his dating app journey with his own personal filter: he’s looking for someone he met in a chatroom back when he was younger, who went by the pseudonym “Princess Zelda.” It’s a cute series of flashbacks that essentially reveals his origin story as a chef through an anonymous romance that he secretly always hoped would become something later in life. Now he only tries to match with women named “Zelda” in the hopes of finding the one that got away. It’s an absurd odyssey through vignettes of Hark cooking for multiple women while clinging to the hope that one of them might be a childhood crush who was named after one of the most popular video game characters of all time, and may not even still live in the same place as an adult.
The problems that arise here are ones that manifest elsewhere in the film as well: every motivation is simplified but not particularly convincing. Hark’s deadset motivation on reuniting with Zelda leads him to cook meals for various women, though while he seems to be a very good chef, his curation is all over the place. Sometimes it’s based on someone having kids or on their kitchen being filled with a particular style of cookware. It exemplifies someone who seems to operate only on his own preconceptions about how others operate, resulting in a lot of disappointment when they don’t think exactly like he does. Locking himself in his own van, chasing a childhood crush, and socially stagnating is evidence of someone trapped in a rut they can’t seem to acknowledge.
Still, The Dating Menu does attempt to subtly contend with this. The problem is that its vignette approach means juggling multiple discrete encounters while also fleshing out a character who is already obviously flawed. Vignettes allow the film to be the cozy cooking film it wants to be, where emotions are uncovered through the simple pleasures of cooking and eating; they are the satisfying courses between rounds of banter. Where the film suffers is in its attempt to curate a wide selection of meals over the course of the film, losing momentum and focus. The performances are all laced with a bit of jadedness and whimsy, but Lo’s never quite shifts into a higher gear, leaving the film stuck in the same rut as its protagonist.
It’s difficult to make a film about cooking, especially across different cuisines, without being a little satisfying. Spice it up with some heartache or yearning, and you’ve got yourself a slightly enjoyable film that might not make much of a meal out of its ideas, but it does tease them in an appetizing way. The Dating Menu is an easy recommendation for fans of melancholic cinema who want a dash of culinary mastery sprinkled throughout. It still manages to cling to some optimistic thread that reverberates in every one of Hark’s actions, but even in a movie where food can suddenly elicit powerful emotions, The Dating Menu is simultaneously quaint and underwhelming.
The 25th New York Asian Film Festival takes place between July 10th and 26th. The Dating Menu celebrates its International premiere on July 16th as part of NYAFF’s Hong Kong Panorama program. The full list of films selected for the festival can be found here.
