"[W]e got twelve kinds of foam, something that I can only describe as 'an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport,' and a teaspoon of savory ice cream that was olive flavored.... [Y]ou can’t order anything besides the tasting menu... you are at the mercy of the servers to explain to you what the hell is going on.... 'These are made with rancid ricotta,' the server said, a tiny fried cheese ball in front of each of us.... 'Rancido,' he clarified.
Another course – a citrus foam – was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. Absent utensils, we were told to lick it out of the chef’s mouth in a scene that I’m pretty sure was stolen from an eastern European horror film.... 'What are we having for the main?'... 'The… main, madame? Um… we’re about to move on to dessert.'... [I]t had been hours, and at no point had we been served anything that could be considered dinner. (There was one time when I thought it might happen – the staff placed dishes in front of us, and then swirled sauces on the dishes, and I clapped my hands, excitedly waiting for something to be plated atop those beautiful sauces. Instead, someone came by with an eyedropper and
squirted drops of gelee onto our plates). 'We’ve infused these droplets with meat molecules,' the server explained, and left."
Served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth.... that was the best part. See it with the foam drooling out of it at that link. Or buy one at
the restaurant's gift shop. It looks like this when unsullied by food:
I feel a little sorry for the restaurant, as all the world is getting pointed at this mocking review. I got there by Today — you know, the TV show "Today" — "27 courses, very little edible: Review of Michelin-starred restaurant goes viral/Would you want to eat foam served in a plaster cast of the chef's mouth?"
Virality brings excessive mockery, that is, mockery not merely because the food was bad and the total amount was small but from people who don't know what a tasting menu is or get the idea but would never choose to eat like that. The best meals I've ever had have been in tasting-menu form, and I would be very annoyed to have people at the next table laughing at the food and asking where's "the main." But each item should be delightful and delicious, not gross and nasty.
Posts
40 comments:
The best part wasn't the plaster cast of the chef's mouth. It was how they were expected to consume its contents.
The food is terrible—and such small portions!.
"it was terrible, I'll never go back"
"Yes, and the portions were so small"
1. If a meme is eternal, it must contain truth.
2. Know your market.
3. If I'm the insurer, I'm nervous.
So,
go to a Michelin-starred restaurant, get "foam"; pay hundreds (and hundreds?) of dollars
go to a diner drive-in or dive; and get delicious FOOD, for twenty bucks?
tough choice!
I ate at Le Cirque once. Regular menu not as many courses, over $125 per person just for food.
Similar experience.
Given a choice between le cirque and McDonald's, I'd choose Wendy's. Better food and more of it.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
I tried to read it. When I got to the licking stuff out of the,, nooo..
I realized the look on my face was uncomfortable..
Being able to "Appreciate" disgusting and bizarre is somehow proof that you are Eaux Sooo Sophisticated..
Blech!
Sounds like the gastronomic equivalent of Hunter Biden painting.
"The best part wasn't the plaster cast of the chef's mouth. It was how they were expected to consume its contents."
Yes, I have that in the excerpt.
I think at other tables, there were diners trying to look sexy interacting with the lips. But this was a table of people proclaiming everything disgusting.
There's a gray area between restaurant and performance art, but with performance art, you need a reverent audience, not hecklers!
each item should be delightful and delicious, not gross and nasty
Which was their point. So no reason for your obnoxious condescending elitist annoyance that they don't know what a tasting menu is.
As the trip advisor reviews indicate, you go there not to eat a meal but to eat an experience.
Methinks the eating party alos brought their own kind of obnoxiousness to that place. I would never go into a restaurant carrying a list of food allergies that the chef must immediately accommodate.
And to complain about the bill? They knew going in what the price would be because it's advertised.
We spent 2 days in San Sebastian Spain eating the world's most fabulous and inexpensive food by just avioiding all the places that had Michilen rankings (there were lots of both).
Anthony Bourdain wept.
Most of these elitist restaurants are disappointments. Maybe they don't serve crap on a plate like this place which never would have gotten off the ground except for their elitism, akin to White Privilege, but their food often is not as good as some whole in the ground mom and pop place.
I have been dragged to the restaurants of world famous chefs, Paris, Rome, Miami, London, New York City, even Sydney. I will be honest with you, some of them are really good, the one in Miami, I remember remarking that the food was excellent, and my daughter was like "Duh! Don't you know who runs this place?" Which I didn't. But sometimes, especially the "tastings" can be like a hot dog eating contest, but unfortunately, no hot dogs. Without those tiny portions, you would not be able to walk out of the place if you ate everything that was put I front of you, "come on, it's wafer thin..."
Great art and architecture, and I guess now, great food, is supposed to engender disgust in the common man, who can't, after all, be expected to understand it.
I couldn't decide what to make of this piece. There was definitely a Homer and Jethro go to the opera quality to it.
Performance art is fine, so long as the audience knows that’s what they’re getting. How did something that doesn’t appear even to be a restaurant get a Michelin star?
I will wait until The Somewhereist starts publishing restaurant reviews.
I too love tasting menus. You, the customer, are putting yourself into the hands of the chef. If he (or she) is a good one, you are rewarded for that trust wonderfully, and I have been many times. But this chef sounds like he just hates his customers and thus abused that trust. He deserves every bit of mockery and bad press he gets.
What is described here is parallel to what has happened in all the other "arts" since....when? Maybe since Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal? Maybe since Gertrude Stein wrote 800 pages of repetitive nonsense and called it a novel? Maybe since Andy Warhol
recorded 12 hours of the Empire State Building, called it a film and it was exhibited at MOMA? I could go on, but it's too predictably tedious. Have you seen what sells for $2 or $20 million at auctions of "contemporary" art? Same story. At least you don't have to eat what Duchamp, Stein and Warhol made -- and you can walk past or walkout. That's the difference.
Restaurant chefs aspire to be artists -- and avant garde artists. It started in the mid-1980's.
FWIW, I had a similar though not nearly so extreme meal last December at twice this price at the "Stone Barns" location of Blue Hill, a highly successful Manhattan restaurant. I suspect the new "vegan" 11 Madison Park (the most highly praised restaurant in NYC, though not quite the most expensive, is similar to "Bros" though with nicer servers. (Btw, relying on "Michelin stars" for ANYthing ANYwhere is foolish, especially outside of France. Michelin is no better than Yelp these days. There is no reliable food journalism restaurant reviewing because (like financial journalism) there is no independent financial backing to support objectivity.)
I recently had breakfast at Mickie's Dairy Bar on Monroe St. Delicious. No Michelin Stars (that I know of). Oh well.
I like tasting menus myself, but it sounds like this was an attempt at molecular gastronomy that was gimmicky and poorly balanced (in terms of sweet/savoury/satiety etc), and didn't really work as a result. My experience with tasting menus is also that I usually emerge feeling full, or even a bit stuffed. And that the servers or the chef are eager to explain each dish. So this was clearly rather different.
I think at other tables, there were diners trying to look sexy interacting with the lips. But this was a table of people proclaiming everything disgusting.
Wait, were there other customers that night? It sounded like there were no other customers when they entered, and this sort of restaurant usually has a fixed seating time so they can prepare every customer's courses at the same time in their limited kitchen space.
I asked them if I could put the meal on my Visa card ... and by-golly, it FIT.
I've walked out of much better, and far cheaper, places for less. Was not going to pay for the privilege of being defrauded. In this case, I'd have had some very strong words for them in Italian ... which gets to a broader issue, which is tourism itself.
If you're not passably conversant in the language, you may be taken advantage of in tourist areas. I flew through Cancún regularly (for my ag development work) because the tourist volume made for very low air fares. Restaurants and hotels were another story, until I informed them in fluent Spanish that I would not pay the "gringo price". Usually good for half to two-thirds off, and in many cases a completely different menu. Same experience in France.
I wonder if people would look at the mouth differently - more as art- if they weren't told it was a plater cast of the chef's mouth.
My husband and I stopped trying to choose Michelin starred restaurants when we traveled. Too many are the same, or maybe I should say different in the same way. So a Michelin starred restaurant in Barcelona is going to have more in common with a Michelin starred restaurant in Paris and not really provide a Barcelona experience. We started looking for really great food in the cities we were in, and that was much more satisfying to us.
I do like a tasting menu. Although one time I got the tasting menu at Nobu, and they asked me if there was anything I didn't care for. I told them I didn't really like uni, and I think that made them disdain me. I swear they started giving me California rolls and kiddie sushi.
We got twelve kinds of foam, something that I can only describe as an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport.
EWR is a pretty grim place, but I've never thought of it as having a taste. Oysters have a taste, or more precisely several. The outside is like salty chalk -- very off-putting compared to the inside. So what part of the Newark airport is the quoted foodie using for comparison? Runway 04L or the carpet in the Bookland shop outside Concourse C2?
Everything's got a bloody flavour, dunnit?"
The writer of this review knew what a tasting menu was and is an experienced food reviewer.
She had done research on the restaurant and this meal was not anything like other reviewers had experienced.
I've done tasting menus before with great results. You expect smaller portions due to the number of courses. But these were absurdly small, even for the number of courses presented.
The restaurant deserved getting slammed for that meal.
There's a gray area between restaurant and performance art, but with performance art, you need a reverent audience, not hecklers!"
There is a fine line between performance artists and bullshit artist. The rubes in the other tables got taken for a ride. The mockery is well deserved.
I read this thinking this was the funniest thing I'd ever read about people getting taken in their quest for 'haute' cuisine. Why would a breathing adult put themselves through this?
The only thing missing- and I'm making a big jump assuming this was missing- was the Chef pissing on a plate and having the servers tell their 'guests' that this dessert was the essence of the Chef de Cuisine, who had just consumed large amounts of garlic and bananas and having allowed his body to combine these key ingredients for hours, now honors them with this 'essence' to top off their meal.
Sometimes people are so taken in by cuisine bullshit.
That said, I do have Grant Achatz's Alinea restaurant on my bucket list. But Chef Achatz is an actual culinary genius. I think.
"There's a gray area between restaurant and performance art ..."
Not with me! I go to a restaurant for tasty food nicely presented and served in a pleasant atmosphere, to be enjoyed with friends and family.
"Performance art" makes me think of that sulky Columbia co-ed Emma Sulkowitz, who went around campus with a mattress on her back, as if she was 'performance-arting' the Boy Scout motto, 'be prepared.'
Nothing gray about it.
While this one was utterly preposterous, tasting menus in a fine restaurant are often the best way to enjoy the place. I've had lots of wonderful tasting menu meals in them. And yes, they were full meals.
Also, I can understand the staff's exasperation with the "food allergy" stuff, since half of those claimed are bullshit affectations that seem to fulfill the need of some people to demonstrate their fancied "uniqueness". Don't we all get tired of people going on ad nauseam about their food allergies?
See the bottom of the linked article for the Chef's response, which is worth noting for its restrained tone and clear explanation of what the chef is trying to do, even if the food wasn't quite enjoyable.
Early in my college days, I was given a sloppy open mouthed kiss, quite unexpectedly, by a girl with very bad beer breath, while I was extremely hung over. I would not be able to avoid thinking of that moment - how I suddenly found myself choking back vomit, our lips open and together - were I ever fed a food foam in such a vessel.
They had some complaints that seemed legitimate, and some that didn't. Worst was that the food didn't taste good -- and, yes, that there wasn't enough of it. (I've read reviews of similar tasting restaurants where the customers came away feeling as if they had experienced an amazing dinner and art show simultaneously.)
But they were also annoyed that the restaurant couldn't accommodate the food allergies of a member of their party -- that seems like too much to ask from a place that plans out very specific dishes in a certain order. (And they were peeved because one of the servers tried to hit on their single female friend by social media afterward -- Italy, am I right?)
Blogger MadisonMan said..."I recently had breakfast at Mickie's Dairy Bar on Monroe St. Delicious. No Michelin Stars (that I know of). Oh well."
It's been too long since I've had a Scrambler.
Isn’t there a Reddit thing called r/wewantplates?
I guess some people go out to eat for the art of it, but at some point, you need to eat. But I guess we have so much food in the world, this isn’t really where you get nourishment.
One of the patrons also had dietary requirements…I think you went to the wrong place for that. It does suck if you like to go out but have dietary issues, but then we are back to this being a performance rather than a meal.
One of the funniest article I ever read. I could not stop myself laughing.
What's not to like? I eat a lot of bait and cat food topped with nuoc mam.
'The best part wasn't the plaster cast of the chef's mouth. It was how they were expected to consume its contents.'
Inevitably, one of the Cuomo brothers will try to take advantage...
Next up for Chef Floriano: testina di vitello (calf's head) served in a plaster cast of chef's rectum. It challenges! Is a perfect expression of Chef's Art!
There is no reason not to mock molecular gastronomy. Our foodie friends took us to one of these famous places. Dessert was one tiny cube of Tang gelatin suspended with plastic wrap over an empty plate. You know, like floating? The meal was over $160 per person.
We picked up Krystal burgers on the way home.
Post a Comment