To enter Netflix Bites, the restaurant collaboration between the streaming giant and the Las Vegas hotel MGM Grand, you pass through glistening red lips, opening wide just off the casino floor, then proceed up a gentle incline.
As you crest the summit, a large image of Beth Harmon, Anya Taylor-Joy’s character from The Queen’s Gambit, hangs to the right. Harmon nestles in a giant martini glass, a chess piece held aloft, chess boards above and below.
Other images from the titles that inspired Netflix Bites hang throughout: a surfer riding a slice of pepperoni pizza that nods to the Surfer Boy Pizza chain in Stranger Things, Queen Charlotte from Bridgerton literally spilling all the tea as she reads Lady Whistledown gossip, the One Piece pirate ship with a cargo of Japanese rice-and-seaweed musubi snacks, and several more artworks.
These images, rendered in saturated colours, owe something to cartoon stills, something to pop art, even a little something to posters by 19th-century French painter Toulouse-Lautrec.
Their aesthetic appeal joins with the game of identifying the shows “behind” the art – yes, that is a manager from Squid Game shown as the frank in a hot dog – and with favourite memories from watching these shows.
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