This is why I have such a boner for the First Amendment and wish we had something like it here. This take down of a terrible chain dump in Manhattan by Pete Wells of The New York Times is one of the finest pieces of train wreck criticism you’ll ever read. It went sort of viral yesterday, even making it to Buzzfeed, which cashed in with an aggregated list of ‘The 10 Most Scathing New York Times Restaurant Reviews Of All Time‘.
Oh it’s horrible, just horrible, but I canna look away!
Wells’ entire review was couched in the form of questions to the celebrity chef and owner Guy Fieri from a confused and disappointed diner. Some highlights?
Did you notice that the menu was an unreliable predictor of what actually came to the table? … 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?
Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?
When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?
Why undermine a big fist of slow-roasted pork shank, which might fly in many downtown restaurants if the General Tso’s-style sauce were a notch less sweet, with randomly shaped scraps of carrot that combine a tough, nearly raw crunch with the deadened, overcooked taste of school cafeteria vegetables?
Is this how you roll in Flavor Town?
You know what would happen if you ran a review like this in an Australian newspaper or magazine? Nothing. Because you couldn’t. Your lawyers would not let you because other lawyers would swoop in like avenging vultures and tear the eyeballs from your head while jackals circled with defamation writs clamped between slavering jaws and bloodworms burrowed into your flesh sucking every last drop of sustenance from your withered carcass before the legal system ploughed it under a garbage mountain guarded by tongueless madmen.
(These last fiends are more conventionally known as the states attorney’s general, who have been promising defamation law reform ever since the first colonial attorney general enriched himself at the expense of the free press and his immortal soul).
Yes. I haz issues.
The food review sections of newspapers are the most likely to be sued of any department. It is not really, legally possible to severely smash a restaurant in Australia without hazarding your family home as collateral for the legal fees you will surely amass when the aggrieved business owner comes after you for ruining their livelihood.
Metaphor in particular will bring you undone. In Australia Pete Wells would soon find himself on the witness stand being monstered by sneering barrister demanding to know exactly – Exactly now Mr Wells! – how many flagons of radiator fluid and formaldehyde he consumed as part of his due diligence in researching this review, so that he might accurately make such a comparison.
Never is it really considered that the demise a dreadful and poorly reviewed venue might have been caused by something like the house specialty of ‘deadened, overcooked school cafeteria vegetables’ or the blue drink that ‘glows like nuclear waste’.
No. It was the review wot dunnit.
This is why we can’t have nice things like the NYT’s restaurant section. I dips me lid to Mark Colvin for bringing it to my attention.
