Mundane and pointless, but IMO entertaining:
Here’s a blog post about a curious dining experience in Italy.
Spec-freaking-tacular review.
It starts out,
It wasn’t dinner. It was just dinner theater.
No, scratch that. Because dinner was not involved. I mean—dinner played a role, the same way Godot played a role in Beckett’s eponymous play. The entire evening was about it, and guess what? IT NEVER SHOWED.
then gets better from there.
A truly wonderful comment:
I’ve eaten there! It was, hands down, the WORST dining experience I’ve ever had–and I’ve eaten at a place where the food was so disgusting, I ended up vomiting on the table. It was worse than that.
Yikes.
Sounds like a good complement to this:
Jay Rayner is a writer and food critic.
ETA: The above is just a short collection of bad-eating anecdotes. Rayner has also written a number of full-length books about good eating.
Extremely pretentious, overpriced, chef that thinks very highly of himself, pushy and uninformative waitstaff, an inability to accommodate dietary restrictions, and an emphasis on presentation and innovation at the expense of actually serving a satisfying meal?
That’s pretty much what I’d expect a Michelin-starred restaurant to be like.
(Also, it’s worth noting that the first thing you see when you open the restaurant’s website is a seizure warning in large print, and there is indeed no menu to be found.)
I find the little marshmallow Cthulhu in black lovely. Not for eating, but as a present for your favourite enemy it looks ideal.
In principle, I have admiration and curiosity for the notion of ‘tasting menu’ experiences. El Bulli in Spain is world famous for this art form, and, as far as I can tell, people who go there know what (in general) to expect from the experience, but always seem to come away surprised and delighted nonetheless.
The restaurant in the article seems like maybe they were trying to do that, but without the necessary skill and art to actually pull it off.
Meat molecules? Must be Bf2, though it looks like they reacted with Goo as well:
“When asked for comment, a Bros’ rep responded with the following extremely on-brand “Declaration by Chef Floriano Pellegrino,” which we are reprinting in its entirety, as they asked:”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this level of pretension outside of a PG Wodehouse novel, or at the very least, an episode of Frasier.
Tasting menus can be fantastic when they’re really good. There are three places around here where I’ve had fantastic many-course tasting menu experiences, and two of them are Japanese. One of the Japanese ones provides a traditional omakase option of either sushi or sashimi, where I found out that in a great Japanese restaurant sashimi doesn’t mean “raw fish without the rice”, but rather, a series of exquisite dishes that precede the sushi. Another Japanese place has a very extensive tasting menu consisting of a sequence of dishes – seems like they never end – all spectacularly presented, and only some of which have anything to do with sushi. The third place is the restaurant of a winery, with a many-course tasting menu where each item is accompanied by a wine chosen by the winery’s owner – who doubles as the restaurant’s sommelier – to be the perfect complement. It’s a large winery so he has a lot to choose from, including many wines that never make it out into the open market (usually because there’s just not enough quantity).
Each one of those places makes me wish that I was rich so I could spend much more time there. That winery restaurant is impressive because although you’d think that not being restricted to any particular style of cuisine would make thing easier, it in fact makes it harder because they have the whole world of cuisine to compete against. But they still manage amazingly well.
you know if it wasnt for the pics id think it was the best eview troll ever ,
Wow – what a writeup!
Interestingly, on Tripadvisor, this place has gotten many positive reviews. Sure, some of them could have been “incentivized” by the restaurant. But others sound authentic. This place must have genuine fans.
According to the article, though, it looks like the Tripadvisor people were served different food.
This isn’t a follow-up project to the Shed at Dulwich is it? An attempt to bluff a Michelin star without any actual food?
I’d be very tempted to pay in an artistic interpretation of money- perhaps a small pile of sand, with ‘€200’ written in it with a finger.
What an ass. So he serves not food, but rather ART, and part of the “art” experience is that you don’t like it.
I was feeling a little bad for the restaurant, I mean how much food do you expect when there are 27 courses?
…then I got to the part about being expected to lick citrus foam out of a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth.
BTW, if you want to read another review of a bad restaurant, here is the nine-year-old New York Times review of Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant. (The restaurant since closed and the link is a “gift link” that should be accessible even if you’re not a subscriber.)
Honestly, I think the foam in the cast of a mouth is a slightly interesting concept. In general though, it just looks like most of the items were rather poorly executed and fell short of their own ambitions.