The San Francisco Metropolitan

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?

Janet Rudolph, owner of a local dinner theater company 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."

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