It seems that money certainly can’t buy you taste (in a literal sense) with celebrity haunt Tao receiving one of the most vicious restaurant reviews in the past year. Australian Besha Rodell recently dined at the Las Vegas club/restaurant/bar and claimed in her review for the LA Weekly, that the restaurant is unworthy of a single star, despite it being rated one of America’s highest grossing venues.

With a headline that reads “Restaurant Review: Tao in Hollywood Is Worse Than We Imagined”, Besha’s distaste for the eatery is plain from the start. She goes on to comment that the eatery’s multitude of famous fans (including a certain family Kardashian) evidently have no understanding of what good food is, considering dishes are priced at up to $100 per dish at Tao. “In fact, I’d say that if we are going to generalise, it would be more accurate to say that the very wealthy in this country have some of the worst taste when it comes to food,” says Besha.

The professional reviewer explains of her expectations early on, “given how much thought and money have gone into the design, I expected the food to be expensive, decent, Americanized versions of Chinese and Japanese classics. I expected the drinks to be too sweet, the sushi to be fresh and the kitchen to rely heavily on easy equations such as (pan + heat) x (noodle + sauce) = delicious.”

But the evening’s meal far surpassed those expectations. And not in a good way. “What I didn’t expect were dumpling skins so thick and glutinous that eating them was a little like biting into semi-coagulated library paste,” she says. “I didn’t expect a uni hand roll to look like a rice ice cream cone with an uni garnish where the cherry on top might be — a mere smidge of urchin roe in the center of a few fistfuls of rice. Nor did I expect that uni to be the wan, dull-colored variety that you find in small-town, landlocked sushi bars, its creaminess turning to liquid, its oceanic pungent flavour edging on acridity.”

The only dish that Besha somewhat enjoyed was a dessert. “There’s a giant fortune cookie dessert that comes filled with chocolate mousse and fortunes for everyone at the table, which clumsily refer to your sex life in ways neither clever nor sexy, but it is what it is: gimmicky, ridiculous, kinda fun to eat,” she says.

The drinks list does not fare better than the food, with Besha summarising, “there’s almost nothing worth drinking on the wine list, unless it’s a $450 Krug kinda night.”

In short, the review calls out Tao for being a rip-off, even by tourist standards. Besha recommends that no matter your intention, visitors to Vegas avoid Tao and its fare at all costs. “I will attempt to salvage meaning from this futile exercise and say: To the tourist visiting Hollywood and looking for an outrageous experience, you deserve better. To the guy looking to impress a date, you deserve better. To Americans rich and poor and in between: We deserve better,” she finishes.