An online review of a Michelin-starred restaurant in Italy is getting a lot of attention, after a travel writer said her experience “wasn’t dinner, it was dinner theatre.”
In a lengthy post on her blog, The Everywhereist, author Geraldine DeRuiter outlined her experience over a 27-course meal that lasted four and a half hours at Bros' restaurant in Lecce.
Though, in the post, she said there was “nothing even close to an actual meal served.”
There was the “tablespoon of crab,” the droplets of gelee infused with meat molecules, the “frozen air” that melted before it could be eaten, and the citrus foam course that was served – without utensils -- in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. The latter, she wrote, “we were told to lick it out of the chef’s mouth.”
“Some ‘courses’ were slivers of edible paper,” she added. “Some shots were vinegar. Everything tasted like fish, even the non-fish courses.”
Nearly everything was served cold, DeRuiter said.
She said the portions for each course were so small that “amassing two-dozen of them together amounted to a meal the same way amassing two-dozen toddlers amounts to one middle-aged adult.”
Her scathing takedown prompted a lengthy response by the restaurant’s chef, Floriano Pellegrino, that included philosophical musings on the concept of art: “What is art? What is food? What is a chef? What is a client? What is good taste? What looks beautiful? What is a man on a horse?”
Pellegrino compared a line drawing of man on a horse with a version from the famous masterpiece series, Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David, and with Misheck Masamvu’s contemporary Trophies and Sycophants, saying he was “bored with spectacular paintings” like the one by David, which are “impressive but it’s shallow.”
“Contemporary art does not provide you with answers, but offers you great questions. Contemporary cuisine should do the same. A chef should not offer easy answers, but challenge you with interesting questions,” Pellegrino responded.
“We thank Mrs. XXX – I don’t remember her name – for making us get to where we had not yet arrived.”
In her review, DeRuiter said she has tried to “come up with hypotheses for what happened.”
“Maybe the staff just ran out of food that night,” she wrote. “Maybe they confused our table with that of their ex-lover’s. Maybe they were drunk.”
She said among the courses her party received were “twelve kinds of foam, something I can only describe as ‘an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport,’ and a teaspoon of savoury ice cream that was olive flavoured.”
There was no menu, DeRuiter said, meaning she had no option other than the tasting menu.
“The servers will not explain to you what the hell is going on,” she wrote.
One dish was a tiny fried cheese ball that the server explained was made with rancid ricotta, she described.
Thinking perhaps something was lost in translation, they tried to clarify if he meant fermented or aged, she wrote.
“No. Rancid.” When she tried again to clarify in Italian, the server responded, “Rancido.”
In her post, DeRuiter included photos of the food, and her seven dining companions reacting to it.
At one point a member of her party was “scolded” for getting up to have a cigarette outside and was told to sit down, she said.
DeRuiter also says one member was served nothing for “three consecutive courses” because the restaurant couldn’t accommodate her food allergies.
Meanwhile, husband Rand was served food he was allergic to because “they didn’t care enough to accommodate [him],” she wrote.
Bros’ website says an eight-course tasting menu costs €130 ($187), while a 13-course tasting menu will run you €200.
DeRuiter called the experience “one of the worst wastes of money in my entire food and travel writing career.”
“Do not eat here,” she wrote. “I cannot express this enough.”
