'Classy' restaurants have been pushing the envelope for too long
Any restaurant review that begins, “There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it’s so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement,” is something I definitely want to buy into.
It’s like Dorothy Parker has been revived from the dead and is eating dinner in Italy.
This review is of the Michelin star restaurant Bros in Lecce, Italy, and the reviewer is Geraldine DeRuiter, a blogger who in the grand tradition of the columnist brother and sisterhood, finds it equally mystifying and appalling that the rest of the world isn’t more like us.
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At Bros, DeRuiter and her party of eight dropped $1,500 on a 27-course “meal” that included snips of edible paper, rancid (the restaurant’s word for it) ricotta, a tablespoon of goo “infused with meat molecules” and my personal favorite, some sort of foam served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth.
It was, DeRuiter wrote in a review that has since gone viral, “the sort of meal that makes you feel as though the fabric of reality is unraveling.”
I will say that some of the world’s “classiest” restaurants have been pushing the envelope for a while now, to the point you can leave me out of it. You will see George Will twerking before you catch me ordering off a tasting menu ever again.
But no one ever says anything, because these are universally acclaimed establishments, and if there is a shortcoming to be found it most certainly rests with the diner, not with the chef.
So finally, DeRuiter is the child pointing at the naked emperor and saying, “Uh, guys?”
I understand there may be something else going on that is more cultural than gastronomic. I personally have been laughed at for showing up at a Parisian restaurant at the ungodly early hour of 7 p.m. There’s a chance, I guess, that the staff at Bros was giggling in the kitchen and saying, “Here come some Americans, let’s screw with them.”
But she is not the first to notice. In 2012, food critic Pete Wells wrote for The New York Times that “the consumer of such a meal may feel as much like a victim as a guest. The reservation is hard won, the night is exhausting, the food is cold, the interruptions are frequent. The courses blur, the palate flags and the check stings.”
I would also argue that, like swimming the English channel, tasting menus require a youthful endurance and optimism of which I am quite incapable.
Forget that when you get old your taste buds harden into unassailable nodes that are about as absorptive as railroad ballast, so culinary nuance is a wasted art. On a good day, I can tell the difference between an oyster and an omelet, but if you’re asking me to distinguish between allspice and nutmeg, forget it.
Really, it takes six or eight bites before the taste even begins to register, so you need something on the order of half a chicken to make an impression. Except you can’t eat that much anymore, so dinner just becomes some ritualistic prelude to bedtime, the way inmates are expected to scrape together some last words before execution.
Nor, in my best days, could I ever sit still for two-to-four hours while the food dribbles out. Conversation comes hard for me, and I’ve usually said everything I have to say in about four minutes. The thought of sitting there for another two and a half hours listening to people talk about what medication they’re on and who they saw at the Celebration of the Lotus yoga lesson that morning is more than I can bear.
DeRuiter tried to put the best face on it, calling it a shared (bad) experience among friends. She’s a better person than I am. But at least Bros didn’t ask them to do the dishes.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Restaurant review shows it's the chef, not the king who has no clothes
