I’m not sure it’s possible for the light to be bad enough to turn the gratinee onions from the “pretty” version provided by the restaurant into the dish scooped from the La Brea tar pits that he was actually served.
Yeah, we’re used to our fast food not looking like it does on the menu, but that’s because it costs $3.50 and is slapped together by some minimum wage kid in seven seconds flat. In a 3 star restaurant, I d
I don’t think your food is supposed to look like it’s covered with oobleck.
That said, I think the critic enjoyed himself a bit too much with the review – the meal didn’t sound that terrible.
But if that’s where they’re eating the food served, and those are the lighting conditions where they’re eating, then doesn’t it behoove the chef to make food that looks good in the available lighting conditions, rather than the perfect light-controlled atmosphere of a photo-shoot?
I mean, yes, it’s not quality photography: which is why those photos weren’t used in the article. But for something that costs roughly $100 per course, I’d bloody well expect it to be visually tailored to the dining environment, and at the very least those awful onions look like they weren’t even slightly designed with that dim lighting in mind.
Every decent writer has a natural ability to turn a phrase, and whether it’s literally “pre-written” or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether Rayner is predisposed to bias in his reviews. Quite honestly I have no way of knowing, but what I can say is that he’s written both good and bad reviews and everything in between, so in the absence of evidence to the contrary I see no reason to doubt his impartiality.
It bothers me when reviewers of books, movies or live theater write critical reviews that are over the top in their attempts at cleverness and wit, because it somehow always smacks of petty vindictiveness from a failed fellow artist: “you may be a highly regarded writer in the popular estimation, but you totally blew it on this one, and I’m not only smart enough to see it, but look – I can write more cleverly than you!” :rolleyes:
I see no such conflict in writing entertaining restaurant reviews, which some critics like Rayner have, to their credit, done very well. Of course there, as everywhere, I object to writers venturing into creative territory that’s beyond their skills and ending up sounding like pretentious idiots. I don’t recall Rayner ever having done that.
Tar-pit onions aside, he did acknowledge some things that were good and was mainly complaining that the disappointments and the net balance of the experience was a very poor value.
I mean, come on. Food that looks good in real life can look like shit in a photo. Trust me, I know. I’ve taken many shitty photos of food that I thought looked spectacular in real life. And I’m a fucking photographer.
I’ve only seen the print version of the comparison photographs, and my first thought was, what a godawful mess to serve up, whichever photo one looked at.
And as for pre-prepared lines, well… he may well have been gearing up for a go at the whole principle of “spherification”, but I did laugh out loud at
*Other things are the stuff of therapy. The canapé we are instructed to eat first is a transparent ball on a spoon. It looks like a Barbie-sized silicone breast implant, and is a “spherification”, a gel globe using a technique perfected by Ferran Adrià at El Bulli about 20 years ago. This one pops in our mouth to release stale air with a tinge of ginger. My companion winces. “It’s like eating a condom that’s been left lying about in a dusty greengrocer’s,” she says. *
I suspect there’s an element of this, in this review. Jay usually wields his facility with words pretty honestly though I think - he’s as likely to praise as anything else, and I’ve read reviews where he has been kind and encouraging to new ventures that maybe just need to tighten up on a few things.
He’s a good egg - takes after his mum in a lot of ways.
That’s part of what makes it questionable to me. When a critic goes so far in his rhetoric, I have to wonder if he’s giving his honest appraisal or if he had thought of some clever lines and he was looking for a chance to use them.
I agree, that article sounds like some self-important snob critic who needed to say something bad about a place just to look “unbiased.” Oh, and look how witty he is. I think there was a Simpsons episode 40 years ago on this topic.
I mean, Jesus Christ, “Sea urchin ice cream was done on Iron Chef in the '90s” is one of this guy’s complaints? Does he also bitch that his loaner Bentley is painted in a shade of silver too close to that on a Ford Fusion?
Sure, “the food is so yesterday” sounds petty and childish, but this is supposed to be a cutting-edge, high-end restaurant. That sort of place should be creating new trends, not offering old one.
Exactly. And I doubt he’d be picking on something like the “breast implant” morsel so much if it were $10 instead of $70. I skimmed his linked review of “Skosh,” which had a similarly minded chef, but was much more reasonably priced and felt like it had some thought put into it.
At any rate, I thought the article was hilarious, if perhaps a bit overdone. For a contrast, I’ve read everything that Ruth Reichl has put out, although I’m unlikely to visit most of her reviewed restaurants. She can be extremely snarky in her own way, but you can tell that it isn’t simply for the sake of enjoying her own snark. In the same vein, I doubt that Jay would seriously put down restaurants that he enjoyed at least to some degree and hoped to enjoy in the future.
PS, I also loved that surgical exposure of Per Se last year in the NYT.
Baloney! You don’t go to a place like Le Cinq for “cutting edge” cuisine, you go because they evoke the Grand Old Past.
There are dozens of place in Paris to encounter hip young cooks who want to shock your palate with their innovations. I will also be going to mom-and-pop bistros that offer cuisine bourgeoise or cuisine a la bonne femme, or fancier establishments that do butter-and-cream haute cuisine pre-1970.
In New Orleans I’ll happily try the up-to-date Creole and Cajun styles at a place like Cochon. But I will also go to Antoine’s to eat the Oysters Rockefeller and the pommes soufflés.
As for reviewers, I still enjoy reading collections of old essays by Ludwig Bemelmans. He’s the guy who wrote and painted the “Madeline” series of children’s books, but try his adult writing, things like At the Hotel Splendide.
But the review talks about one canape that’s a “spherification”. That’s only the Grand Old Past if your idea of the Grand Old Past is the past couple of decades. It’s molecular gastronomy, in other words, and not all traditional food.
But underlying all of this is the fact that this is a multiple-starred restaurant making big claims, carrying big reputation and charging fucking enormous prices. The only reason for a bad review is the bad food, the reason for a terrible review would be bad food and a bad ambience, the reason for this abysmal review is both of the above plus a mugging when the bill comes.
Maybe it’s different in Paris but 'round these parts I wouldn’t go to a restaurant buried in a hotel and experience a top-drawer experience. Adequate, certainly. Over-priced, probably (most folks eating there are on an expense account). But the same as one of the celebrated chefs around can put on in his/her own establishment just isn’t going to happen.
This isn’t just any hotel, though. This is the George V, not the local Holiday Inn, and this is a three-Michelin-star restaurant, not the Toby Carvery. Even the restaurants at the Savoy in London don’t have that distinction (I’m not sure if the Savoy Grill still has its single star or not).
It’s not terribly unusual to have excellent restaurants in hotels. Chicago has a two-Michelin star restaurant called Sixteen in the Trump Tower, for instance. Nomi Kitchen in the Park Hyatt has a stellar reputation (I’m not sure if it currently has a Michelin star or not, but it did at some point.) Way back in the day, the Pump Room of the Ambassador East was perhaps the city’s finest dining establishment.
FWIW, I went to Yosma with a bunch of colleagues for an office Xmas lunch just last December, largely on the basis of Rayner’s review. The service was a bit erratic, especially given that it was a slow Friday afternoon with few other customers, but there were no problems with the food. Accepting his caveats about location and price, it seemed a case of him doing a rave about a bloody good, mid-priced, new place in central London. Which was exactly what we were looking for.
