The greatest restaurant review ---------- ever!

[JHan]

Le Cinq, Paris: restaurant review

It was supposed to be a joyous trip to one of France’s famous gastro palaces – what could possibly go wrong?

by Jay Rayner :

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/09/le-cinq-paris-restaurant-review-jay-rayner

The dining room, deep in the hotel, is a broad space of high ceilings and coving, with thick carpets to muffle the screams. It is decorated in various shades of taupe, biscuit and fuck you. There’s a little gilt here and there, to remind us that this is a room designed for people for whom guilt is unfamiliar. It shouts money much as football fans shout at the ref. There’s a stool for the lady’s handbag. Well, of course there is.

******************************************************************

Other things are the stuff of therapy. The canapé we are instructed to eat first is a transparent ball on a spoon. It looks like a Barbie-sized silicone breast implant, and is a “spherification”, a gel globe using a technique perfected by Ferran Adrià at El Bulli about 20 years ago. This one pops in our mouth to release stale air with a tinge of ginger. My companion winces. “It’s like eating a condom that’s been left lying about in a dusty greengrocer’s,” she says.

******************************************************************

We hit it again in an amuse-bouche which doesn’t: a halved and refilled passionfruit, the vicious passionfruit supplemented by a watercress purée that tastes only of the plant’s most bitter tones. My lips purse, like a cat’s arse that’s brushed against nettles.

******************************************************************

The cheapest of the starters is gratinated onions “in the Parisian style”. We’re told it has the flavour of French onion soup. It makes us yearn for a bowl of French onion soup. It is mostly black, like nightmares, and sticky, like the floor at a teenager’s party.

A dessert of frozen chocolate mousse cigars wrapped in tuile is fine, if you overlook the elastic flap of milk skin draped over it, like something that’s fallen off a burns victim. A cheesecake with lumps of frozen parsley powder is not fine. I ask the waitress what the green stuff is. She tells me and says brightly: “Isn’t it great!” No, I say. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten. It tastes of grass clippings

Epic

[saidsimplesimon]

1. Thank you JHan

Most corproate owned establishments are over-rated, over-priced with lack luster food. I have no desire to stay in them or eat in them when traveling. Keep it local whenever possible stateside or across both ponds, imo.

[JHan]

4. what's killing me is the hype of the restaurant and the disappointment.

and you're right, the best grub is often found in the most unassuming places

[ProfessorGAC]

25. On That Subject

So, i'm on business at a site in Louisiana. We go to this joint in LaPlace. Place looks like a total dump, but it's close to the site, and on a good path back to the airport.

Inside is ok, but very neat and clean. The cajun cuisine there was to die for. This was back in the 90's and to this day, i would be willing to get on a plane, fly to NO, drive to LaPlace, eat, go back to the airport and fly home.

[progressoid]

2. I have some French relatives that will love this!

[JHan]

5. lol ;D

[Pacifist Patriot]

3. I thoroughly enjoyed that!

[JHan]

6. i can read it over and over and over again. It's brilliantly scathing.

[BainsBane]

7. 3 Michelin stars

Someone's taste is off, either Michelin or the reviewer.

[JHan]

14. Some believe Michelin has lost its way.. VF wrote a good piece about it..

I even bookmarked it, interesting read:

The Michelin guide also created a new type of customer, the foodie trainspotter, people who aren’t out for a good meal with friends but want to tick a cultural box and have bragging rights on some rare effete spirit. Michelin-starred restaurants began to look and taste the same: the service would be cloying and oleaginous, the menus vast and clotted with verbiage. The room would be hushed, the atmosphere religious. The food would be complicated beyond appetite. And it would all be ridiculously expensive. So, Michelin spawned restaurants that were based on no regional heritage or ingredient but grew out of cooks’ abused vanity, insecurity, and fawning hunger for compliments.

Being French, of course the guide has always been the subject of conspiracy theories regarding the allocation of stars, the number of inspectors, and their quality and disinterest. Having made the hierarchy of chefs, the guide found that it was in its interest to maintain it. A handful of grand and gluttonous kitchens seemed to keep their rating long after their fashion and food faded. Michelin evolved from the wandering Candide of food to become the creeping Richelieu: manipulative, obsessive, and secretive.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/11/whats-wrong-with-the-michelin-guide

Just the sort of dining culture Jay Rayner's acerbic wit was created for...lol

[TygrBright]

8. Whaddaya expect from a place called "Sank?" n/t

[Hekate]

9. Worst restaurant ever, apparently. My sis & her husband are great cooks & like to spend...

...the occasional anniversary eating at to-die-for places. I had to send this to her immediately, so she could laugh as much as I am.

[DFW]

10. Sounds like competition for the original Frog & Peach n/t

[pansypoo53219]

11. I do not want anything t hat has been PLATED or stacked.

best pie was the ugliest pie.

[Duppers]

21. Amen. I hate "stacked" food.

Wanna mess up the full taste of individual foods? Stack the fuckers.

[geek tragedy]

12. right up there with the NY Times review of Guy's American Kitchen

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html

[JHan]

13. Yep. One incredulous question after another, coming to terms with the horror of the experience...

"Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?

At your five Johnny Garlic’s restaurants in California, if servers arrive with main courses and find that the appetizers haven’t been cleared yet, do they try to find space for the new plates next to the dirty ones? Or does that just happen in Times Square, where people are used to crowding?

[Grammy23]

15. After listening to The Daily Briefing with Spice-boy....

I needed a good laugh. This story did it. Thanks for the comic relief. I shared with my niece and her husband plus a friend, all who have traveled or in lived in Europe so they will enjoy that review.

[sheshe2]

16. That was hillarious.

Bravo to Jay Rayner...perhaps he should review one of tRumps dumps next.

Thank you JHan.

[kwassa]

17. Here is a hilarious review of one of Trump's restaurants ....

Trump Grill Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America

And it reveals everything you need to know about our next president.

excerpt:

Perhaps Trump’s veneer of a steakhouse is too obviously a veneer, meant for the hoodied masses to visit once and never return. (There are already an infinite number of articles about how Trump’s mass-produced products are meant to impress a hollow sense of wealth.) And prior to his victory, it seemed as if the world of Fifth Avenue power brokers agreed: the lobby was perpetually empty, the Grill(e) mostly frequented with Trump Tower residents and locals looking for a convenient power lunch, if any of the bigger, better power-lunch spots nearby were full. But later, when I read previous reviews of the Trump Grill before he became a presidential front-runner, I was shocked to discover that the food back then was bland, mediocre, and as Eater’s Robert Sietsema once wrote, “for timid people with digestive problems.” In other words, it was a culinary marvel lightyears beyond the rich-man slop we ate at the Trump Grill weeks after the election. (And indeed, it was slop: as soon as I got home, I brushed my teeth twice and curled up in bed until the nausea passed.)

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/trump-grill-review

[sheshe2]

18. I just read through the link....

and the pics of the food?!!? What was that?

http://media.vanityfair.com/photos/58518de661d9dbac5b8b91bc/master/w_900,c_limit/trump-tower-grill-restaurant-new-york-city-04-01.jpg

That tall drink...looks like someone puked...the taco bowl???? Hmm look like Donnie shat in it.

Thanks Kwassa~

[sheshe2]

19. Kicking

[JHan]

20. lol :D

I'm still laughing.

[smirkymonkey]

22. Hysterical!

Scathing, but very funny!

[betsuni]

23. Thank you for posting this, it's great!

[malthaussen]

24. Thanks, I'll avoid that one in future...

... not like I was ever going to go there in the first place.

I did once dine at a 3-star restaurant (Le Gavroche, back in '90) and dropped 200 quid for one person. But unlike the poor lad's experience at the Cinq, it was worth every shekel. This one sounds like a meal on which nightmares are made (and his pix confirm it).

-- Mal