Our favorite delicious bad review
Allegory of Taste by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Our favorite lines from As Not Seen On TV, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells’s now-famous review of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar: all of them, but especially these. (In blue, like the watermelon margarita that tastes like radiator fluid and formaldehyde.)
Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?
What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?
Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?
And when we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?
Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?
Mostly we’re gnawing our liver with envy because a negative review of a restaurant would not appear in our major dailies. Virulent attacks on political figures: Sure! Ad hominem attacks on show business personalities: Go ahead. Hypercritical movie reviews: Fine. Hypercritical book reviews: Umm, we review each other. But bad restaurant reviews: No no no no or we could never eat there again (As if we’d want to eat there again).
Have we mentioned that we got our Today column because of a bad restaurant review? We had total freedom. True, we had no ads because we published negative reviews (and that eventually killed us), but we could write whatever we wanted. Those were good times.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
November 21st, 2012 at 09:27
Yes, I liked your snark then. You were the reason I read that newspaper at our school’s library. You have spice and flavor, and not afraid to bare yourself.
Many Filipino writers have that self-congratulatory, condescending, smug tone that I find so damn annoying. And afraid to rock the boat.
Not too much, anyway.
They should just keep on polishing their awards.
Truth be told, you’re the only Filipino columnist/blogger that I read. I want irony, sarcasm, lots of snark, blended in a vat of geek sauce (who cares what you want–said the voice in my head).
Anyway, I read the review in NY times sometime last week, and as I had not heard of Guy Fieri before, the article made me look him up.
He may look like a douche, but oh man, that review. It’d be hard to live that down.
“How, for example, did Rhode Island’s supremely unhealthy and awesomely good fried calamari — dressed with garlic butter and pickled hot peppers — end up in your restaurant as a plate of pale, unsalted squid rings next to a dish of sweet mayonnaise with a distant rumor of spice?”
Distant rumor of spice! Love it.
November 21st, 2012 at 10:10
I read that some columnists also got their start the same way.
If it is impossible and life-threatening to give a critical review of restaurants, I think it would even be more impossible to be critical of food cooked by someone you really know. I am very careful whenever my mother, friend, or co-worker/s would let me sample what they prepared lest I would get in big trouble. Standard response that I blurt out: nice. Then I kick myself in the head.
November 21st, 2012 at 12:48
Wahahahaha! It almost makes me want to experience really bad food. Almost.
On the positive side, there are worse things than an excellently written bad review.
(On first reading the title, I thought it was a review of Breaking Dawn II :D)
November 21st, 2012 at 19:47
If my parents ever figure out how to use Twitter without embarrassing our family, almost half of their entries would be bad restaurant reviews.
Seafood Island: Pangit ang service. Di nagbibigay ng tinidor pag may handa na boodle.
California Pizza Kitchen: Hindi na kami babalik. Muntik na akong ma-bypass pagkatapos kong kumain doon.
Outback Steakhouse: Hindi na masarap noong tinanggal nila sa menu yung salmon.
These are the charitable reviews, by the way; wait until you hear what my Mom has to say about British and Italian food. (And the entire programming roster for TLC Southeast Asia, for that matter. She can’t decide who she hates more: Anthony Bourdain, for being a chef who doesn’t cook, or Adam Richman, who eats nothing but gigantic amounts of red meat and processed cheese.)