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Culinary Crimes

By Kerry Reid Everything old is new again, in dining as in history. The booming '90s in San Francisco share something unexpected with the Roaring '20s. More than ever, interactive murder-and-dining theater companies pepper our cities, and their appeal is not limited to just the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. So why are they so popular? And, most important, is the food any damn good? Ted Curry of Entrée to Murder has been running murder mystery/dining events since 1992, most recently at A. Sabella's restaurant on Taylor Street. Addressing these very questions, Curry says, "Most people come to these things thinking the food is going to be secondary. I think why we're successful is that we chose a restaurant that is top-rated. We just got a review last week that said they came expecting community theater performances and standard food, and they gave us top marks on both scales." As for the increasing popularity, Curry notes, "We wanted to get Joe Blow out of his chair in front of the TV and into seeing live theater. There are a lot of [dinner theater] companies where they will serve you food and you'll watch a show, and they have nothing to do with each other. The food is an inherent part of our show. It's written into the script." Janet Rudolph, owner of another local dinner theater called Murder on the Menu, is uniquely suited to understand the zeitgeist behind the murder/dining phenomenon. As a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Rudolph wrote her dissertation on religious currents in mystery novels and wrote restaurant reviews and served on panels discussing "culinary crime"--literally, how to kill with food--in mystery literature. With Murder on the Menu, Rudolph stages events custom-tailored to corporations, government agencies, schools ... just about anyplace where solving a crime together may help build team spirit. Rudolph uses a variety of Bay Area caterers, whom she praises as "fantastic," to fulfill the changing requirements of her scripts and clients. She maintains that there are some basic rules she follows in the interests of taste. "We don't want to bring out someone with a knife in their chest during the main course." Rudolph recently did an event at a winery in Napa and cautioned, "You also don't want to poison anyone with the winery's vintage." However, the locale did allow her food imagination to run wild by writing into the script such vintages as Cheesy Chardonnay, Escargot Merlot and a variety of other "meal in a bottle" combos. Rudolph also says, "We don't usually kill people with food [in the scripts]. I know how to do it, but I don't." In keeping with the recycling of eras, if the economy goes into a tailspin, maybe some enterprising restaurateur could make a fortune re-creating the horror films of the '30s. "Hi, I'm Frankenstein and I'll be your waiter this evening ..." Entrée to Murder, 415/981-2583 Murder on the Menu, 510/339-2800. [ San Francisco | MetroActive Central | Archives ]