A low-key weekend with the boys looks a little different when the boys have a combined net worth of $342.5 billion. For starters, it can be safely assumed that most attendees will arrive by private jet. And once you actually make it to the hang, you may find that the whiskey bottles are resting on little whiskey plinths.
With all those billions — and egos — swirling around, it can help to set a few ground rules. “No deals, no meals, no high heels,” Steve Carell’s character reminds his friends shortly after they’re reunited in “Mountainhead,” HBO’s new satire about four tech titans on holiday while a disinformation crisis of their own making threatens to destroy civilization as we know it.
As for Rule No. 1, fair enough; no one wants to be pitched while off the clock. But it’s Rule No. 2 that Souper (Jason Schwartzman), who welcomes the group into his 21,000-square-foot, new-build Utah ski lodge, seems to have the most consistent trouble with.
As the try-hard “poorest billionaire in the gang,” his hosting impulses constantly run afoul of the casual poker-night vibe that his masters-of-the-universe guests are seeking. Somewhere along the line, Souper seems to have learned that the way to a tech bro’s pocketbook is through his stomach, and one of the movie’s best recurring gags is the abundant yet untouched spread of snacks, which slowly proliferate like an algal bloom, first overtaking one kitchen island, then the one right behind it.
Souper’s eagerness to impress eventually prompts one of the film’s most subtly ridiculous questions. Is turbot, a bottom-feeding European flatfish with eyes on the left side of its head, a meal in and of itself, or is it simply “a picking fish”?
Huh?
“What’s a picking fish, dude?” asks Jeff (Ramy Youssef), an artificial intelligence entrepreneur and turbot skeptic. “This is poker night. There’s no staff, no chefs. This is supposed to be, like, club sandwiches, heart-attack burgers, chicken buckets.”
Undeterred, Souper presses on with his plans for the “six-man line-caught turbot” (impressive!) he acquired for the occasion. Naturally, those plans necessitate what may be described as the fifth character of “Mountainhead”: the kite-shaped, two-handled copper-and-tin turbot pot, or turbotière, that he uses to prepare it.
Few things scream privilege quite like hyper-specific, single-purpose cookware — a fact that Jesse Armstrong, who wrote and directed “Mountainhead,” would surely know as the creator and showrunner of “Succession,” which took a similarly unsparing look at the excesses of the 1 percent. Over that show’s four seasons, he fleshed out the world of the ultrawealthy Roy family with help from the production designer Stephen Carter, who also joined him for “Mountainhead.”
Nailing the details is essential for someone like Mr. Carter, who, by his own admission, doesn’t himself travel in such rarefied circles. Had he ever heard of a turbotière before starting work on “Mountainhead”?
“Absolutely not,” he said with a laugh. Because the movie was shot mostly on location near Park City, Utah, Mr. Carter enlisted Monica Jacobs, a fellow “Succession” alum living in New York, to help the film’s Utah-based prop master “hit the right note for the high-end, you know, luxury of it all.”
Given the film’s tight production schedule, Mr. Carter didn’t have time to be terribly picky. “It was the first one that they found that seemed plausibly nice enough that they could get their hands on in time,” he said, adding, “It’s a rather specific piece.”
And how. Ms. Jacobs ultimately found the vintage turbotière that was featured in the film at Sterling Place, a home goods shop in Brooklyn not far from where Mr. Carter lives. Ms. Jacobs snapped a few photos of her find, which a tag identified as a “Turbot Fish Pot in Copper & Tin” (price: $750), and sent them along to Mr. Carter in Utah.
Although other, more impressively worn-looking models can be found online for as much as $1,600, it’s probably for the best that Mr. Carter didn’t hold out to comparison shop: He might have been waiting a while. Even on their websites, major cookware retailers don’t stock the highly specialized turbotière — by that or any other name.
“Williams Sonoma, Sur La Table will never, ever have anything that specific — they’re too mainstream,” said Fotini Tsiramanes, who works at the Loaves & Fishes Cookshop in Bridgehampton, N.Y. Reached by phone on Sunday, Ms. Tsiramanes said the store outfitted a great many kitchens in the Hamptons, often staffed by professional chefs cooking for some of the nation’s wealthiest and most exacting. Keeping a turbot pot on their shelves, she suggested, would be a waste of space.
“It’s something that we would never bring in,” Ms. Tsiramanes said, “because you are the first person in my 14 years of working here who has ever requested one.”
For a bottom feeder, the turbot has a rich history of touching off questions of class and status. In the 1960s, the matter of which flatfish were entitled to bear the proud name turbot aroused the attentions of the State Department, the Supreme Court and the Danish Embassy.
“Is it a prince of the piscatorial kingdom or a bargain counter bonanza?” The New York Times asked in 1972, as the reputation of “true” turbot (a luxury fish found in the English Channel and the North Sea and imported from France) was being tarnished by an influx of lower-grade “Greenland turbot” (actually halibut) in supermarkets.
Its admittedly peculiar anatomy notwithstanding, turbot could easily be prepared in a more conventional pan. But for certain gourmets and strivers, that would be beside the point.
“In this case, it’s more about Souper wanting to impress these friends of his that come over to his house for the first time,” Mr. Carter explained. “Like, ‘What would a sort of insecure tech-bro millionaire have around trying to impress his tech-bro buddies?’”
