In 2012, the New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells wrote a review of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen and Bar, in Times Square, so scathing that it went viral. Conceived as a sort of open letter to Mr. Fieri himself, it consisted entirely of rhetorical questions like, “Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?” and “When we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?”
Damning, to be sure, and quite saucy (no pun intended) for the usually genteel Times. And yet Wells’s review seems almost Puritan when compared to a review that caught the Internet’s attention last month. This one, published in the London newspaper the Observer, considered a “steak and crab joint” in that city called Beast, where, the writer declared, “the corn-fed, dry-aged Nebraskan rib-eye, with a carbon footprint big enough to make a climate-change denier horny, is bloody marvelous.” And, he went on, “at £100 a kilo it bloody well should be. At that price they should lead the damn animal into the restaurant and install it under the table so it can pleasure me while I eat.”
These were the words of the critic, novelist, and television personality Jay Rayner, who writes sometimes incendiary, often crass, always cheeky assessments of restaurants in his native U.K., and who is often mistaken for the chef Marco Pierre White. On a recent evening at Union Hall, in Park Slope, he used his doppelgänger to begin a PowerPoint presentation called “My Dining Hell,” flipping between a photograph of himself and one of White: “Marco. Me. Marco—we are not the same bloody person.” Then he slammed White’s food: “A little while ago, I went to the Marco Pierre White Steakhouse and Grill. I still remember the smoked-mackerel-and-whiskey paté. If that had been found in the deserts of Iraq in 2003, there would have never been protests across Europe against the invasion of Iraq. They would have gone, ‘Fair, dudes, take the fuckers out.’” (His brand of humor would have done well in the Catskills in the nineteen-sixties.)
A fitting start—Rayner was there, he explained, “to talk to you about bad reviews. Well, the reviews are brilliant. But I’m here to talk to you about reviews of truly terrible restaurants and why we like them.” He had several theories: because we’re horrible; because it’s a way to take revenge on every bad restaurant experience we’ve ever had; because it makes us feel better about ourselves. “There’s also the idea of catharsis, in Greek theatre, that you read something terrible and then you feel better, you have a purging,” he said. “And if the restaurant meal is truly appalling, you will literally purge yourself.” (Ba-dum ching.)
He likes writing about terrible restaurants, he explained, because “when you start to write about good restaurants, the lexicon begins to close down. You end up in the language of the motivational poster. But when you’re talking about a bad restaurant, basically you are rubbernecking at a car crash. And the language opens up before you. There are more tools in the toolbox.” Citing the famous Tolstoy line about happy versus unhappy families, Rayner argued that it could be applied to restaurants. “All good restaurants are good in the same way: they have tables; they have chairs; they have nice food, and it’s served by people who aren’t psychopaths. The number of ways by which restaurants have to fuck things up, the bad ones, leaves me speechless—for a little while, until I sit down to write.”
He cycled through some of the ways: Waiters who begin service by saying things like “Hi, guys, can I tell you about the concept behind our menu?” (“I choose, you bring, I do not want to know! That worked for a very, very long time.”) Waiters who are too quick to refill wine glasses, or too eager to ask, “How is everything?” Misguided menu language: basil-enthused, homemade (“Who made the rest of this crap?”). Then he launched into a list of his worst-ever restaurant experiences: a branch of Buddha Bar where the music was so bass-heavy you could “basically get a prostate exam at the bar” and where a “Red Thai” salad “was to Thai food what Robert Mugabe was to democracy.” A Kosher restaurant with gefilte fish so leaden it “could pull planets out of alignment.” A place called Abracadabra, where the urinals in the men’s bathroom were shaped like open, lipsticked mouths and the faucets in the ladies’ were designed to resemble penises.
Penises came up again during the post-PowerPoint Q. & A., as the conversation shifted to differences of style in the U.S. and the U.K. Of his Beast review, Rayner said, “There is absolutely no chance that that would ever have appeared in an American publication. If I had filed a review to the New York Times which said the list was full of Montrachet and Pomerol and priced for men with very small penises, I would have had a phone call from a fact-checker saying, ‘Do you have an e-mail line which proves that it was priced for men with small penises, and what do you define as small?’”
In London, he explained, the stakes are different. “There are eleven of us, patrolling the waterfront and competing with each other, and being absolutely aware that if we’re not entertaining enough you will go and read someone else,” he said. “Pete Wells doesn’t have that competition, and I think that leads to a certain elegance and decorum, which perhaps makes it less of a fun read, if I’m absolutely honest. It may be more precise and more proper. It may give you even perhaps possibly a more considered review of the restaurant, but you’re not going to necessarily laugh as much. And obviously it’s all about the laughs.”
“How do we get that here?” a woman in the audience asked. Rayner looked thoughtful. “There’s a great division in the U.S. between popular and highbrow culture, which is less existent in the U.K.,” he replied. “It’s almost as if when you get to the quality press, whatever you want to call it, in the U.S., there’s a fear that if you get too down and dirty, you’re giving in to the forces of popular culture. I have no idea how to loosen the bra straps on that.”
Could he describe something he liked?, another woman wanted to know. He hesitated for just a moment, before eloquently describing a dish he’d had the previous night at Estela, in Manhattan: a sea-urchin omelet that he deemed “one of the most glorious things I’d eaten in a long time,” just set, “with that kind of brilliant iodine tang of sea urchin.” Highbrow. But then, with a twinkle in his eye, he went on, “Sea urchins and oysters—a taste for them is a mark of adulthood, I think, and also of a healthy sex life. Women should never take a partner who doesn’t like oysters and sea urchins, ’cause it’s not gonna be good. I said that in a review once!”
