For now, the Murphy children are safe. They’ve been deposited in an elegant dining room with white tablecloths and candles in glass orbs, backdropped by a mural of raptors and trumpeting parasaurolophuses.
Starving from the day’s near-death dino encounter, the kids tear into the provided buffet—melons, salads, fancy cakes—and grin across a table at each other. But then the girl’s eyes widen. The shadow of another raptor is visible behind the mural, and this one is on the hunt. The big bite of green Jell-O on her spoon wobbles wildly.
And that’s about when a green Jell-O dessert of its own lands right in front of you, all the better for you to enjoy Jurassic Park’s third act in a blissfully raptor-free setting.
This is how it goes at Taste the Movies, a series that brings “film-to-table experiences” to venues around the Twin Cities. The screenings are dreamt up and hosted by Ranya Svoboda, who got the idea after a… shall we say lackluster showgoing experience at a venue in town.
Svoboda and her husband Bill love food, drink, and music, particularly of the classical variety, and she wanted to bring those things together in an elevated setting. The first dinner-and-a-show she hosted with her company, Champagne Ivy Events, was actually a Vivaldi violin concerto: The Four Seasons, by candlelight, with a menu prepared by chef Kevin Aho of Umbra Minneapolis.
“We paired courses with each season, where you got a spring salad when he played 'Spring,' you got a winter soup when he played 'Winter' … you could just really feel immersed in the seasons,” Svoboda tells Racket.
Before long, she started bringing that immersive quality to another kind of classic: movies. The first installment of Taste the Movies took place earlier this summer, with multiple nights of Ratatouille at Hotel Emery.
“Ratatouille has been our number-one seller, because it’s the most adorable movie, it’s centered around food, and people know what they’re getting when they buy the ticket,” Svoboda says. But the central flick at Taste the Movies isn’t always food-related—a seven-course dinner might make sense to accompany an animated movie about a friendly, French fare-loving rodent, but what do you do about Shrek? Or Jurassic Park, where humans are typically what gets eaten?
With many of the movies, Svoboda has had to get creative. “So for example, that T-rex scene where there’s the little goat in the rain, we did little sliders with a goat cheese fondue, and then we had a T-rex spicy cocktail,” she says. The evening also involved a drink served in a little dinosaur egg.
Svoboda outlines the menu for each Taste the Movies screening herself, then works with chefs to add fun flourishes, and she says they’ve all been able to execute the original ideas surprisingly well. “My ideas are crazy sometimes!” she laughs. For an upcoming screening of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (sorry Potter heads, it’s already sold out), the kitchen team at Canopy by Hilton actually purchased molds to make chocolate chess pieces inspired by the wizard's chess scene. “I’m blown away by the creativity of the chefs that we’ve been privileged enough to work with.”
That’s all the more impressive when you realize Taste the Movies has been hosted all over Minneapolis, from Canopy by Hilton to Giulia at the Emery Hotel to Rand Tower Hotel. Upcoming holiday screenings of Home Alone and Elf are taking over the Granada Theater in Uptown. “We kind of leveled up, like, ‘We want a real movie theater experience,’” Svoboda chuckles. Tickets aren’t cheap—upcoming screenings are $159.99 with mocktails or $169.99 with cocktails—but that cost reflects that work that goes into hosting a transportive multi-course meal in collaboration with a big team.
The screenings just about always sell out, and Svoboda says many of those tickets go to repeat customers.
“I see the same names coming through every time, and that just means the world to me … It’s my dream to be able to dream up these events and bring them to life.”
