Exactly, and that’s the sense in which we’re fans of DDD. Still, you have to enjoy a scathing review well-written.
It may well be the first restaurant review that made my jaw drop. At this:
Why indeed? Fried lasagna noodles in nachos? There’s poorly-made food, and then there’s insanity.
Also:
I…ugh.
He’s a douche inside the show.
Any man who will wear a platinum blond bleach job *and *a gelled, spiked do with frosted tips, *and *wear sunglasses indoors and wear said sunglasses on the *back *of his head, *and *have that fake ass tan *and *those cliche tats *and *wear those bowling shirts that Charlie Sheen wears *and *rock a pinkie ring *and *wear those leather wrist band thingies *and *wear those 10 gage metal hoop earrings *and *have that awful goatee, of which he has dyed a blonde strip down the center is a douche in *and *out of Diners Drive-Ins and Dives.
Any of those things on their own is fine. A combination of some of those things are tolerable. All of those things together? Textbook Douche.
That was awesome.
that, alone, made me a little queasy.
No it’s more than textbook douchebag, he takes it up to 11.
A combination of most of those makes someone a textbook douche. Having literally every single one of those things, whole new ball game of douchiness.
Is there anything he’s missing? Seriously.
You’re being generous here.
Man, this review is ON POINT!!!
Anyway, this bit made me laugh aloud:
Huffington Post has a slideshow of some of the best lines from other reviews of the same place. It doesn’t look like Wells is the only one to have gotten some licks in.
I found most of that review over-the-top.
But this did seem relevant:
Fieri goes around and finds places that serve food that’s awesome without being pretentious. That’s the combination he should be aiming for in his own restaurants.
The vast majority of that review was perfectly fine. There was some hyperbole scattered around (“touch the void”, “panic grip your soul”) but there were a ton of serious issues raised, and just because they were dressed up with some funny language does not mean it wasn’t a serious review or something to be dismissed.
After the first two paragraphs, the review points out:
- missing ingredient
- two food items described as large in some fashion (“boulder” and “big”) that were actually small
- greasy dish that lacked the flavors mentioned on the menu
- good sandwich with deeply inaccurate menu description
- soup never arrived
- cocktail with chemical off-tastes
- untrained/subpar waitstaff (plate clearing, not helping to find a party already seated)
- unseasoned dishes that were advertised as spicy
- nachos containing fried lasagna noodles and cold meat
- wrong beverage
- sugary sauce on meatloaf
- bland rice dish
- vegetables in one dish a mix of very overcooked and nearly raw
- cold, soggy French fries
- improperly made “donkey sauce”
- collapsed Baked Alaska
- marshmallow tasting like fish
- fries never arrived
I mean, damn, if just a few of those things happened at a restaurant I doubt I’d be motivated to ever return. I stopped going to a nearby Italian restaurant after the first trip had an insanely slow kitchen and the second trip managed to produce a tomato-based pasta sauce that somehow had no flavor. (I even had my husband taste it. We were amazed at the utter lack of any flavor, even of tomatoes. Pretty much all we could taste was the chopped raw parsley sprinkled over top.)
A few zingers about Fieri from Anthony Bourdain’s roast (Bourdain’s most relevant comment in bold):
My sister works a couple of blocks from there. She forwarded me the review and said she wouldn’t have eaten there before the review but she will walk over and take a look.
Now I really want nachos. Good ones.
As a guy who loves his nachos, I would like to add that it is perfectly possible (and not uncommon) for restaurants to fuck up nachos. The lasagna crisps or whatever sounds pretty bad, but I’ve had worse.
Put that way, conceded wholeheartedly.
FYI, Brian Williams and the producers at NBC Nightly News thought the review (which I believe ran on the Times’ front page!) was so snarkily outstanding that they included a mention of it on last night’s telecast.
I also read somewhere that he treats the owners and staff of those places like shit, making unreasonable demands and generally acting like an asshole. I looked up the Yelp reviews on his other restaurants around the country and there are a lot of complaints. His places seem to average 2.5-3 stars (out of five), which means a lot of one- and two-star reviews. Sounds to me like he has it coming.
I still like this review of the place better:
The Crispy Crimes of Guy Fieri: Junk Food T.V. Star Takes Times Square
As much as I can’t stand the guy, I’d be blown away if he darkens the door of any one restaurant more than twice a year.
Am I the only one who automatically dismisses overly snarky reviews? When a reviewer seems more in love with his words than food I lose all respect for their opinion. Its not about you.