Today, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells published a punishing takedown of Guy Fieri's Guy's American Kitchen and Bar in Times Square, written entirely in scathing, sarcastic questions. Such as:
How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable?
By the way, would you let our server know that when we asked for chai, he brought us a cup of hot water?
When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?
Ouch. But Wells isn't the only critic with a sharp pen and some axes to grind--the complete and utter takedown of a restaurant, the art of dropping a goose egg, has a long and proud tradition. Here are the best in recent (and not-so-recent) memory, split up by genre:
The Fish in a Barrel
Restaurant critics generally hem and haw, claiming to enter a dismal restaurant with a Pollyannaish hope that maybe, just maybe, this meal won't be as bad as they fear, but Pete Wells knew that Guy Fieri's midtown circus was going to be a disaster going in. The Fish in a Barrel, then, is almost purely an exercise in rhetorical abuse, written for the entertainment of the discerning reader.
Jay Rayner, the critic for the British newspaper the Observer, is one of the most inventively nasty critics out there, and his review of Abracadabra, a ridiculous London restaurant, is a prime example of FiaB reviewing. Here's how it begins:
Abracadabra isn't so much a restaurant as a random sequence of events. I could describe it as bad - and believe me, the food is, in a very special way - but that really doesn't do the experience justice.
And you can imagine how it goes from there. (Okay, here's a taste: "The burger is dry and black. It costs 18 pounds. I mourn the cow.")
Frank Bruni, the NYT critic of the mid-2000s, wasn't one to pull any punches, either. His famously harsh review of the Fish in a Barrel restaurant Ninja began with this bang:
Confusing the point of a restaurant with the mission of a "Saturday Night Live" skit, Ninja New York deposits you in a kooky, dreary subterranean labyrinth that seems better suited to coal mining than to supping.
and ended with a withering dismissal:
For a toddler with a trust fund and a yen for udon and maki, Ninja might be a valid alternative to the Jekyll and Hyde restaurant. For just about anybody else it's nonsensical, and its climactic illusion may well be a disappearing act.The Baffling Popularity
A somewhat more useful type of review, if you believe that journalism should serve the public interest, is the baffled takedown of a restaurant that everyone seems to like. The New York Post's proudly curmudgeonly Steve Cuozzo is a master of the genre, and his pan of Shake Shack (well, mostly its lines) is a prime example. Like Wells at Guy Fieri's, Cuozzo is crankily astonished:
What compels New Yorkers to stand in Soviet-style, multiple lines under a broiling sun to procure a hamburger that's an also-ran at best?
What's the appeal of tiny beef patties most customers consume in five minutes, thanks to their famished state after waiting longer than they would at an airport?
How masochistic are New Yorkers that they'll go even after seeing live Web-cam images of the snaking queue that awaits them?
Unsurprisingly, he does not find a good answer to any of those questions. These kinds of goose eggs have room for mercy, as with Sam Sifton's Disappointed Father review of Eddie Huang's Xiao Ye. Sifton wanted to be impressed, but ended up dishing out faint praise:
As it stands, though, Xiao Ye is an artful misfire: the sort of place that, as Mr. Huang sadly appears to desire it to be, is really only best when the customers are a little drunk, a little high, maybe both and in any event extremely hungry.
And some less-faint zingers:
Cabbage said to have been steamed with garlic and chilies, then drizzled with lardo, tastes of cardboard and water, a school-lunch nightmare that is hard to shake. There are punishingly salty, barely pickled cucumbers. A beef rib braised into pale, flabby submission in a mixture of ginger beer, chilies and tomatoes might have been made by your college roommate in a borrowed Crock-Pot one night over winter break, then discarded in favor of Greek pizza from that place out by the discount liquor store.
But perhaps the most famous, baffled, and baffling destruction of a popular restaurant came last year, from GQ's food critic Alan Richman.
He started out by heaping praise on the modern Quebecois diner food at M. Wells, but things soon spiraled out of control, with the review turning into a defense of his own critical objectivity, an account of another dinner marred by extremely slow service, and then, out of left field, an accusation of sexual harassment. In three short pages, he turns from being "happily stunned by a gargantuan meat-loaf sandwich stabbed through its heart with a serrated knife" to "I do not forgive the people at M. Wells for what they have said. I wish there were some way they would not get away with it. I'm pretty certain they will, and I will always be sorry for that." It might not be all that helpful for the average customer, but it's certainly one for the history books.
Epater la Bourgeoisie
This could be considered something like shooting fish in a golden barrel, but the added sticker shock of eating $50 glop adds a special gleam to the reviewer's pitchforks. A.A. Gill, writing for Vanity Fair, seems to have an appetite for skewering golden calves--it's hard to pick a favorite quote from his piledriver to Jean-Georges Vongerichten's nouveau-Chinese restaurant 66, but here are a few gems:
Having treated you at the door like social scurvy with contagious halitosis, the staff subtly changes demeanor once you're inside. They treat you like deaf cretins with learning difficulties.
Every city with a Zagat needs to have a ridiculously overpriced, underdesigned, absurdly smug, dark diner, staffed by humorless snots who think they're gastronomy consultants and mongers of chic, so that we can point and laugh and say, "Oy, it's only dinner"--think of it as a sort of edible self-help group-therapy thing.
Hard to top, but Jay Rayner can hold his own at an oligarch axing, as in his review of Novikov, a London restaurant opened earlier this year by a Muscovite restauranteur:
This is generally very, very bad: prices that knock the wind out of you and moments of cooking so cack-handed, so foul, so astoundingly grim you want to congratulate the kitchen on its incompetence.
And so my advice to you. Don't go to Novikov. Keep not going. Keep not going a lot. In a city with a talent for opening hateful and tasteless restaurants, Novikov marks a special new low. That's its real achievement.
Some épater-ing, though, is best done not with bluster, but with an endless barrage of understated barbs, like this authoritative 1982 destruction of a restaurant called Regine's from the *NYT'*s Mimi Sheraton:
In six years of reviewing, we have never come across service and food that have been so consistently poor as that found at Regine's, the well-known Park Avenue discotheque and restaurant.
But she didn't just wave a pan-wand over the whole proceedings. Sheraton got granular, quoting a pompous server:
When we complained of slow service, an unshaven captain said: ''Well, madame, if you knew how to order properly from a captain instead of from waiters, perhaps you would get things promptly.''
And closing out with a whipcrack dessert critique:
The most depressing dessert was puff pastry with unripe strawberries. The pastry looked like flaked wet Uneeda Biscuits and the minted cream tasted like toothpaste.
Hachi machi, is that harsh.
The Continental Hack-Fest
The worst review of all time, however, is staggering not only in its sly meanness, but in its scope: in his 1880 travelogue A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain took it upon himself to discourage readers from ever eating any food in all of Europe, period. It's worth reading in full, if you get a chance, but here are a few strokes of Twain's broad brush:
After a few months' acquaintance with European "coffee," one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed.
Next comes the European bread--fair enough, good enough, after a fashion, but cold; cold and tough, and unsympathetic; and never any change, never any variety--always the same tiresome thing.
Next, the butter--the sham and tasteless butter; no salt in it, and made of goodness knows what.
There is here and there an American who will say he can remember rising from a European table d'hote perfectly satisfied; but we must not overlook the fact that there is also here and there an American who will lie.
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