The author practically eviscerates the restaurant and its employees. Very well-written and funny (link).
Yeah, expensive restaurants are not necessarily good. I have been a victim of that.
that’s brilliant 
i love the line where she doesn’t know which side of her meat to complain about
My favorite restaurant review is still Sam Sifton’s review of Nello in NYC.
I was going to add some more quotes, but then realized I would have ended up quoting the whole review.
My favorite: Snails=Dinosaur boogers.
This scatological passage alone sets the tone for what is evidently the shittiest restaurant in the city:
I love this! 
The entire 2nd paragraph is gold. If you ever happen to find yourself in Paris, indeed. “Hey, I’m trying to find Budapest. Can I take a shortcut through that city over there? Any good places for lunch there?”
I love these types of reviews.
I once had a bad experience in an up scale restaurant in Mt. Tremblant. A 40$ plate of bolognese, plate full of spaghetti with a ladel of bolognese sauce on it that disappeared into my spaghetti with two twists of the fork. Then I was basically eating a 40$ plate of spaghetti.
The sauce tasted a week old and was bland no flavour at all and nothing close to a bolognese sauce. It was awful.
Finest Italian eating my ass.
My favorite part:
(Bolding mine).
I have to remember never to eat a snail that won’t fit up my nose. Good tip.
Well, with all due respect, it is beyond imagining how anyone would choose the $40 bolognese to begin with. If I had $40 for my entree, it sure as hell wouldn’t be a pile of pasta with red sauce on it, and if that was the only thing on the menu that I could afford, I’d get the hell out of there and go to a restaurant where my $40 would buy me a beautiful piece of meat or fish or something exotic and unusual that I’d never had before.
I’m trying to decide between the dinosaur booger snails and the suppurating renal brick.
labially pink cloths. you feel like a suppository.
paris has no superpowers and parisians are not supermen. and no superman would work as a chef. people just expect too much out of restaurants. it’s a law in business: good products and services raise sales but poor ones maximize profits. don’t expect quality to be sustained even with regular price adjustments.
if you want quality for every bite, do it yourself, or be nice to your partner.
So… shame on Ibanez for ordering something on the menu that he thought he’d like? Or shame on the restaurant for having that on the menu? Or shame on me for misunderstanding your point?
True. But bolognese is also not really supposed to be a red sauce, as that term is commonly used. It’s really mostly just ground beef with a little bit of tomato concentrate in it. It should mostly be meat and not very sauce-like at all. It’s actually not supposed to have a lot of ragú in it, if it’s trying to conform to the classic preparation (which looks like this or perhaps like this Problem is, bolognese means so many things to so many different people, and American interpretations of Italian dishes are usually sauced much more liberally than in the homeland versions, so people here are much more used to there being tons of sauce on their pasta.
Still, I wouldn’t pay $40 for a plate of bolognese.
I think that’s the implicit point to this kind of review–that is, to point out how mindless the political economy of restaurants can be.
Wouldn’t you say a similar review could be written for Musso and Franks?
Home town red sauce italiano restaurant, great review in the paper. not a small hole in the wall. But being heartily sick of yet another serving of spaghets and meat-a-balls, I ordered shrimp scampi. Very disappointing! An extensive menu, they put all their time, money and energy into their spaghetti “specialty”. They didn’t even TRY. I actually wrote to the restaurant reviewer and got back, “well, maybe it was an off night for the kitchen”. No, it was off for me!
I ordered seafood risotto in a new Italian restaurant in town once. It was very undercooked. I complained to the waitress who snottily told me that it was not undercooked and that risotto is meant to be served al dente. I told her that I knew very well how risotto was supposed to be prepared and that al dente didn’t mean crunchy. The place only lasted a couple of months.
Ah, welcome to the work of AA Gill.
He’s a brilliant writer and reviewer. Very intelligent and thoughtful. Incisive, honest and cutting. One of the best in the UK.
Which is a shame because he’s an absolute shit.
Epic:
“It is, all things considered, entre nous, the worst restaurant in the world.”