Once, only critics could make or break a restaurant. Now every diner with a smartphone is armed and often more savage. So whose verdict cuts the deepest: the pros or the punters?
While a good restaurant review can fill the reservation book, the bad can be devastating. Reading a recent review headline “Dead flies in the soy sauce” made my stomach churn, but it also dropped for the chef. Reading it, I also feel a little PTSD, dating back to my own time as a reviewer.
In fairness, bad Australian reviews are generally softer than UK take-downs. While our critics might moan that “flavours jangle like a car crash”, or compare a dodgy pork chop to dry Weet-Bix, in the UK back in the day, reviewing was a blood sport, and the late A.A. Gill was the master of the hounds. He once described a posh Parisian dining room as giving you the feeling of “being in a second-class railway carriage in the Balkans”. He went on, “It’s painted a shiny, distressed dung brown. The cramped tables are set with labially pink cloths, which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository.” Ouch!
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The dourness of minimalist restaurants is often a rich vein to mine. I think I actually snorted when I read one critic’s description of a dining room as having the “chicness of an underground bunker where one would expect to be interrogated for the disappearance of an ambassador’s child”.
Food has seldom been as savagely slammed as Gill’s review of a NYC chef’s shrimp and foie gras dumplings. “What if we called them fishy liver-filled condoms?” he wrote. “They were properly vile, with a savour that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.”
Fast forward, and we now live in a time where everyone is a reviewer. Punters seems to be less rude but, perhaps more damagingly, more matter of fact. Trawling through one-star reviews on TripAdvisor, Yelp and others, there are descriptions of “tiny pretentious food, a complete waste of time”, or a personal favourite: “grossly priced and full of its own self-importance”. Well, I won’t be going there, then.
Negative reviews also tend to take aim at the experience – “Even the Greek take away around the corner is better”; “Kingfish sashimi was very bland, I had better at sushi train”; or the angrily terse “$33 glass of rose was warm. Forty minutes later and still no main course”.
Then there are some meals that earn the full rant: from spilt wine and G&Ts topped with sparkling water to the bill – how much for mineral water? – and complaints about noise, lighting and wine lists in a font size usually used on that bit of a legal document lawyers don’t want you to see.
Some amateur reviewers use humour to try and save you from eating at a venue. Take: “Wow, my crab has dry ice on it. Why, did it need a wart removed?” and the subsequent disclaimer that the experience was so “underwhelming I’m embarrassed to admit I even dined there”.
A one-star experience is perhaps most categorically summed up by this reviewer: “We are told there is an option to take leftovers home. We choose not to. The last thing we want… is to take any part of this dreadful… experience with us.” Someone pass that chef some sutures.
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