A Restaurant Review For the Ages

Food is a fairly rare tag here, but I do occasionally mention it. I'm prepping for my trip to Spain and stumbled across this restaurant review in The Guardian. It is a masterpiece of adroit criticism and I am deeply jealous:

There is only one thing worse than being served a terrible meal: being served a terrible meal by earnest waiters who have no idea just how awful the things they are doing to you are. And so, to the flagship Michelin three-star restaurant of the George V Hotel in Paris, or the scene of the crime as I now like to call it. In terms of value for money and expectation Le Cinq supplied by far the worst restaurant experience I have endured in my 18 years in this job. This, it must be said, is an achievement of sorts.

This meal for two cost €600 and was a truly memorable experience:

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. Spherifications of various kinds – bursting, popping, deflating, always ill-advised – turn up on many dishes. It’s their trick, their shtick, their big idea. It’s all they have. Another canapé, tuile enclosing scallop mush, introduces us to the kitchen’s love of acidity. Not bright, light aromatic acidity of the sort provided by, say, yuzu. This is blunt acidity of the sort that polishes up dulled brass coins.

Even the decor receives a rapier thrust:

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.

"Thick carpets to muffle the screams." How I wish I had said that! Now this, instead of another smug excursion into virtue-signalling, is what we need in classical music journalism. A review that gores someone's ox so thoroughly that all that is left is oxtail soup.

Do we need an envoi after this? Of course we do. In honor of French music, this is the Symphony in C by Georges Bizet, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Bernhard Haitink: