Great Moments in Hatchet Jobs
By In her roundup of classic negative reviews, Kathleen Geier cited Pete Wells’s review of Guy Fieri’s Times Square profit-taking venture. And that was a great review — funny without condescending to the food in principle or to the target market.
His review last week of an extremely overpriced Manhattan hotel restaurant is almost as good:
Think of everything that’s great about fried chicken. Now take it all away. In its place, right between dried-out strands of gray meat and a shell of fried bread crumbs, imagine a gummy white paste about a quarter-inch deep. This unidentifiable paste coats your mouth until you can’t perceive textures or flavors. It is like edible Novocain.
What Villard Michel Richard’s $28 fried chicken does to Southern cooking, its $40 veal cheek blanquette does to French. A classic blanquette is a gentle, reassuring white stew of sublimely tender veal. In this version, the veal cheeks had the dense, rubbery consistency of overcooked liver. Slithering around the meat was a terrifying sauce the color of jarred turkey gravy mixed with cigar ashes. If soldiers had killed Escoffier’s family in front of him and then forced him to make dinner, this is what he would have cooked.
That last line alone earns him a place on Kathy’s 2014 list…