They are the scourge of restauranteurs the world over: critics. A bad review can make or break a restaurant, but a really bad one – a review that body-slams a place, mops the floor with its face, seeks to draw blood and then spit on the grave – can be devastating when not outright ruinous. It doesn’t help when the critic in question can actually write, either: the eloquence, loquacity and sheer verve of a wordsmith like A. A. Gill (pictured) precludes any question of dismissing the reviewer as a philistine, rubbing salt into the open wound instead. We remember some of the best bad reviews of recent times, as well as dip into the archives, for an invigorating end-of-weekend touch of snark.

We begin with what is arguably A. A. Gill’s most famous negative review: his passionate rant against Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s 66 in the pages of Vanity Fair. After berating the vibe, the décor and the staff, Gill moves on to the shrimp-and-foie-gras dumplings, resulting in one of his most brilliant, cringe-inducing metaphors: “What if we called them fishy liver-filled condoms?” he writes. “They were properly vile, with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.” “The memory of the rest has been elided into one long, bland, watery compost that could barely incite flatulence.”

Thomas Keller’s Per Se fell of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list this week, relegated to the second tier at #52, a remarkable slip from its heyday in 2013, when it peaked at #6. Writing in the New York Times in January, Pete Wells all but predicted this relegation, noting sadly that “the perception of Per Se as one of the country’s great restaurants, which I shared after visits in the past, [appears] out of date.” “Dinner or lunch at this grand, hermetic, self-regarding, ungenerous restaurant brings a protracted march of many dishes,” Wells writes. “These dishes, all of which Mr. Keller made famous years ago at the French Laundry in Napa Valley, show his rare combination of American playfulness and rigorous finesse. One could argue that it’s a little lame that Mr. Keller is still trotting them out.”

In 2002, Matthew Evans found himself at the pointy end of a legal controversy that would continue for years after his review of Coco Roco on Sydney’s King Street Wharf hit the newstands. “If a restaurant serves good as well as bad food, do you give it the benefit of the doubt?” he asked at the beginning of the review, auguring what was to follow. “[W]hy should I do it here? Especially when more than half the dishes I’ve tried at Coco Roco are simply unpalatable.” “It could be argued that Coco is still settling in. But apricots in sherry-scented white sauce aren’t meant to garnish a rib eye of beef. The menu isn’t held back by minor glitches; it’s flawed in concept and execution. … Coco Roco is a bleak spot on the culinary landscape.” The restaurant went into administration less than two years later (the picture above shows the restaurant being valued before it was auctioned off). In 2009, a judge found that the article was written as a comment and did not give rise to damages, though that decision was reversed by an appeals court two years later. The review eventually cost Evans’ newspaper $600,000.

And you thought Gordon Ramsay was mean. In 2012, LA Weekly‘s Besha Rodell gave the foul-mouthed celebrity chef a run for his money when she decided to take on his now-defunct Los Angeles restaurant Fat Cow. “How could our lunch possibly be so bad?” she asked several paragraphs into her review before going on to enumerate all the ways in which it was. “Branzino ceviche was so besmirched by dollops of goo both green (avocado?) and yellow (horseradish?), it looked like a science experiment gone wrong,” she wrote. “It was so disturbing it prompted me to take a picture and send it to a friend, who responded, ‘That looks malignant’. How was the fish? Who knows? All I could taste was glop.” But it was ultimately something more than the quality of the food that got on her goat. “What galls is the act of misleading those folks, the people who are curious about all the hype given to food these days, who might decide to put themselves into Ramsay’s hands to help them figure it out,” she wrote. “The hoodwinking of those customers is the real reason this restaurant is more offensive than the sum of its not-very-good parts.”

When the popular US steakhouse chain Smith & Wollensky crossed the pond to London last year, The Guardian‘s Jay Rayner was having none of it. “This US business has swaggered into London like it thinks it’s the bollocks,” he wrote. “The description is almost right, if you remove the definite article before the reference to testicles. It is about as shoddy an operation in separating people from inexcusable amounts of their cash as I have seen in a very long time.” He kept this tone up for the remainder of the review, which he ended more or less as he started: “We are told there is an option to take left-overs home. We choose not to. The last thing we want, as we walk out the door, is to take any part of the dreadful Smith & Wollensky experience with us.”

“Good god it’s a breathtaking space,” our own national restaurant critic, Anthony Huckstep, conceded in his review of The Wilmot earlier this year. It was a shame the food wasn’t equally impressive. “In an effort to make an impression, [executive chef Ryan Hong has] forgotten balance, harmony and at times it seems he’s got too caught up in an idea instead of simply making a dish work,” Huckstep wrote. “Or recognising the building blocks that make dishes work.” After making his way through several ho-hum starters and mains, Huckstep writes that “it got weird. And by weird, I mean I’m still scratching my head.” “We were given a dessert we hadn’t ordered, and there was no sign of the one we had. Perhaps the waiter could have told us, and perhaps we could have ordered something else. A dessert we’d like to try.” “Instead we were given a non-descript mirage of meringue and berries that bear no more mention. We didn’t complain, but it also didn’t appear on the bill. I’m still confused.”

“There are lines I can fathom and lines I can’t,” Tom Sistema began his recent Washington Post review of popular D.C. restaurant Founding Farmers. He certainly couldn’t fathom the lines here. Far from it. “Almost everything I’ve eaten here in recent months – chicken wings so small they should be called chick wings, gummy cheesy pasta with listless lobster – smacks of coming from something other than a kitchen with a chef in charge,” he wrote. “[N]o one asks why so much food remains when staff come to collect our plates. Had my waiter inquired, my posse would have told him the swamp posing as shrimp and grits was about as close to the southern model as rap is to opera.” “Never mind that it’s noon,” he finished. “Order a Sazerac. It will help you forget what you’re about to eat, or at least keep you much better company than the cooking.”

The Australian‘s restaurant critic John Lethlean was not impressed by the Adelaide Oval’s Hill of Grace Restaurant earlier this year. “The kitchen fuses Filipino food traditions with a contemporary, if unnecessarily complex approach,” he wrote. “Some of it is fine … but the brown, mucoid gloop that passes for a pig liver sauce smothering duck sausage and shimeji mushrooms is not.” “[Hill of Grace] occupies some kind of sad, ill-informed contemporary fine dining void; it’s like the rest of the restaurant world doesn’t exist. I’m trying hard to think of someone I’d recommended it to. I just can’t.” Stadium Management Authority chief executive Andrew Daniels (pictured) said he was “deeply disappointed” by the review. “He has gone way beyond objective criticism,” he said, noting that the restaurant was considering taking legal action. “I have never in my entire career read a review like it.”

“The second I was presented with the menu, ” Lesley Chesterman wrote in her 2014 review of Decca 77, “I knew something was off.” Thus began “an all-out fiasco,” the recounting of which in the pages of the Montreal Gazette can’t but make the reader wince. There was the fish finger that had the “texture of canned cat food” and the lobster and bone marrow salad that was “the worst restaurant dish that has ever passed my lips.” There was the waiter who “tried to upsell us at every opportunity,” suggesting the most expensive wine options and pushing Chesterman’s male dining companion to order a $45 deer chop because he looked like he appreciated red meat. “In 16 years of restaurant reviewing, I had yet to hear that kind of sexist sales pitch,” she wrote. “Desserts sealed the miserable deal,” she finished. “When I asked our waiter about the butterscotch ice cream, he looked confused and headed to the kitchen to inquire before coming back with a bowl of it. You can’t make up incompetence like this.”

Before Matthew Evans and John Lethlean, there was Leo Schofield. Australia’s most famous negative restaurant review undoubtedly remains Schofield’s 1989 takedown of the Blue Angel Restaurant, which resulted in a defamation case that dominated the newspapers for weeks and whose ramifications for Australian critics remain felt today. According to Schofield, the restaurant’s garlic prawns had been “converted into chewy little shapes without a lot of flavour” and its lemon sole into “a slab of overcooked fish slimy with oil”. Tame compared to Gill, perhaps, but then Schofield started talking about the lobster. Waiting 45 minutes for this to appear “should have really sent the balloon up for us,” he wrote. “Even Godzilla boiled for 45 minutes would be appallingly overcooked. Which is what our grilled lobster most certainly was, cooked until every drop of juice and joy in the thing had been successfully eliminated, leaving a charred husk of a shell containing meat that might have been albino walrus.” Schofield and the newspaper eventually had to pay the restaurant’s owner $78,000 and $22,000 to the restaurant itself. More than $50,000 interest was added. But the real cost was to the critical culture, which would forever have the Sword of Damocles – or at least of defamation – hanging over its head. This has proved especially true for restaurant critics, who by the very requirements of the job will always have a hard time employing the truth defense: they can’t prove what they’ve written is accurate because they’ve eaten the evidence.

We finish where we came in, with the incomparable A. A. Gill doing what he does best: besmirching overinflated reputations in need of a good besmirching. His 2011 review of L’Ami Louis for Vanity Fair became a classic of the genre the moment it was published. “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,” he began. “In the middle of the room is a stubby stove that also looks vaguely proctological.” He was merely warming up. “Foie gras is a L’Ami Louis specialty,” he wrote. “After 30 minutes what come are a pair of intimidatingly gross flabs of chilly pâté, with a slight coating of pustular yellow fat. They are dense and stringy, with a web of veins. I doubt they were made on the premises. The liver crumbles under the knife like plumber’s putty and tastes faintly of gut-scented butter or pressed liposuction. The fat clings to the roof of my mouth with the oleaginous insistence of dentist’s wax.” That sounds appealing compared to what comes next. “Nothing I have eaten or heard of being eaten here prepared me for the arrival of the veal kidneys en brochette,” he writes. “Somehow the heat had welded them together into a gray, suppurating renal brick. It could be the result of an accident involving rat babies in a nuclear reactor. They don’t taste as nice as they sound.” His final flourish is to condemn the place utterly for the rest of time. “It’s undeniable that L’Ami Louis really is special and apart,” he writes. “It has earned an epic accolade. It is, all things considered, entre nous, the worst restaurant in the world.”