Directed by Chris Smith
Featuring Sarma Melngailis
Running time: 45 minutes-61 minutes per episode
Rating TV-MA
Premieres on Netflix March 16th

by Whitley Albury, Staff Writer

Restaurant life is wild. There’s the rush of adrenaline that comes from surviving a rough dinner rush, the lows of things falling off the wheels. And then there’s life after the doors close, where there’s music and drugs and fun. Well. That’s all in a usual restaurant. At Pure Food and Wine, it was a different story.

Sarma Melngailis seemed to have it all once she took full control of the restaurant in the early aughts, even if she did also take over the $2 million worth of debt that her former business partner brought on. And within the first fifteen minutes of the first episode in the four part docu-series, it’s easy to think that her partnwe was the villain in this story. I was wrong, he was like a low-level street thug from the original Batman movie. No, the real villain was Anthony Strangis, also known as Shane Fox.

I can slightly understand why Melngailis was interested in Strangis. He was someone from her hometown, he seemed worldly and cultured, he had a large online following. Oh, and he was very, very rich. She turned down Alec Baldwin so she could get to know Strangis better. We never see current footage of Strangis in this documentary, just hear his voice in the very beginning talking about how telling her story is a bad idea.

Strangis is honestly deserving of a documentary of his own. He “worked” with the CIA, he had millions in assets, he fought demons, he could help Melngailis and her dog, Leon (truly the only living being in the film who did nothing wrong), ascend from the earthly plane and live forever. You did indeed read that right. He basically combined all the badass dark fantasy tropes and twisted them to fit his own means. In reality, he had a gambling problem, and had a weird way of manipulating Melngailis into believing every single word he said.

The series follows a similar format to Netflix’s other popular docu-series, with interviews from everyone who was there and a part of the madness, including a homeless guy Melngailis made friends with outside of her apartment building. There’s some archival footage of Melngailis’ interviews when Pure Food and Wine first took off and took the food world by storm, along with recreated texts between her and Strangis. There’s a thread of emails and texts between Melngailis and Strangis’ IT guy which is truly a wild segment. There’s this ongoing series of recorded phone calls between Melngailis and Strangis that really highlights this strange relationship between the two, but there’s not a context as to when these recordings were made. The editing was linear enough, without a strong need to have a specific timeline for the events. The story alone is bonkers enough that there’s no need for specifics.

With all that being said, though, where this docu-series doesn’t compare to the likes of Tiger King and other highly popular series is that, as a viewer, I didn’t feel empathy for the subject. Yes, the series does highlight the fact that this relationship was twisted and at times very dark, but I never felt for Melngailis, as she sprinted as fast as she could through the red flags that she and her entire restaurant staff pointed out. She’s never really grilled as to why she followed along with everything Strangis told her to do. As pointed out at one point, it seemed like she was running a soft con on him, since he was allegedly loaded and she needed money for her empire, and in turn he was conning her. So it was just this ouroboros of con artistry, with neither one wanting to budge. It’s definitely worth a watch, if anything to see how strange this relationship was, but mainly if you just want a new true crime story that doesn’t involve murder.