[imagesource: Elle-Rose Moogan]

There’s something about a scathing restaurant review that captures people’s attention.

It has to be done well, though, especially during COVID-19 times when the hospitality industry is on its knees and deserves to be cut some slack.

In years gone by UK-based Jay Rayner carved out a niche for himself with his takedowns. He appears to have softened in recent times, though, so we now hand the baton to travel writer Geraldine DeRuiter.

She recently visited Bros’, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Lecce, Italy, where her group was served a 27-course meal.

Included among the courses were rancid cheese, shot glasses filled with vinegar, droplets infused with meat molecules, and a very strange plaster cast of the chef’s mouth that was dribbling foam.

On her blog, Everywhereist, she posted ‘We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever’.

You’re welcome to read that in full here but let’s get some highlights via Today:

“I’m pretty used to experimental cuisine, and I’ve been to a few Michelin-starred restaurants,” she said. “So I was anticipating something a little unusual and fun. I was not expecting a 4-hour hunger induced fever dream.”

“…those hours spent consuming 27 courses, “made me feel like I was a character in a Dickensian novel. Because — I cannot impart this enough — there was nothing even close to an actual meal served.”

…Among the itty-bitty “courses” were edible paper slivers, shots of vinegar, a tablespoon of crab, fried cheese balls with rancid ricotta, a partial scoop of green olive ice cream (“I thought it was going to be pistachio”) and, of course, the plaster cast with foam, which looks like the mouth of a person suffering from rabies [above].

I’m a simple person to please when it comes to food. I do not want a rabid mouth presented to me, thanks.

What the hell?

Only slightly less creepy than an eye.

“It’s as though someone had read about food and restaurants, but had never experienced either, and this was their attempt to recreate it,” she wrote…

Dessert, which came after the party hadn’t realized they’d already been served the main course, featured a marshmallow-flavored, cuttlefish-shaped object, and “frozen air” that melted before it could be consumed.

For the privilege of this dining experience, each member of DeRuiter’s party coughed up between €130 and €200 (between R2 300 and R3 600).

You can look through more snaps of the various courses in this thread:

Here are some photos I took of the experience to add to the story 😂 pic.twitter.com/SqPZHrHpB9

— Elle-Rose Moogan (@ellerosetweets) December 8, 2021

Let’s hand over to DeRuiter for a power finish:

We howled at how ridiculous it was, and how they’d poisoned Rand [her husband]. How maybe we should have known that a restaurant named “Bros” was going to be a disaster.

It was like an awful show that we had front row tickets to. But wasn’t there something glorious about sharing it together, the way that a terrible experience makes you all closer?

“No,” someone said, and we laughed even harder.

At least they could laugh about it.

As enjoyable as the review was, every restaurant should be given a right of reply.

A representative for Bros’ did just that in the form of a three-page PDF that is, um, pretty out there. Strap in because here we go:

You have to applaud the pettiness of throwing in “We thank Mrs. XXX – I don’t remember her name” at the end there.

This only served to give the review more attention, with DeRuiter talking to CBC about the response:

DeRuiter says she was “delighted” by the chef’s response.

“Once I step away from the hilarity of it, I do believe that he is making a rather legitimate statement about the nature of art, inherently,” she said.

“But where that takes us to is: Is food inherently art? And if so, what role does the patron play in that? And can we completely disregard the patron if we are a chef? And can we say what the patron believes is entirely unimportant?” DeRuiter said.

She admits that the review is mean but says she isn’t normally so aggressive with her criticism:

“I must sound atrocious. I must sound like a monster describing this,” she said. “I used to be a kind person. I did. I did, before I went here. I don’t know what happened. It broke something inside me.”

Fork out in excess of €130 for a meal, only to leave ‘hangry’, and I might feel a little broken, too.

[sources:today&everywhereist&cbc]