It's not often that a Canadian restaurant review goes viral. But that's exactly what happened to a damning review penned by The Globe and Mail's dining critic, Chris Nuttall-Smith. His scathing analysis of the Trump Hotel's top-floor restaurant, America, has been shared more than 16,000 times on Facebook. Chris didn't hold back on what he thought was poor service and an obnoxious environment. Readers...
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Day 610:40The art of the bad restaurant review
It's not often that a Canadian restaurant review goes viral. But that's exactly what happened to a damning review penned by The Globe and Mail's dining critic, Chris Nuttall-Smith. His scathing analysis of the Trump Hotel's top-floor restaurant, America, has been shared more than 16,000 times on Facebook. Chris didn't hold back on what he thought was poor service and an obnoxious environment. Readers delighted.
This is not the first time a hilariously bad restaurant review has gained such notoriety. In 2012, New York Times food critic Pete Wells wrote a causticreview of Guy Fieri's self-titled Manhattan venture, Guy's American Kitchen & Bar, that became a worldwide point of discussion. TheGuardian's Jay Rayner even released a book of his 20 most biting takedowns, My Dining Hell. But why are the hatchet jobs so magnetic to us?
"There's an element of schadenfreude to it," says Nuttall-Smith.
He suggests there's some degree of validation to reading a bad review. Readers can know they aren't alone in their own occasional poor experiences at restaurants. He thinks that reading a bad review can be vicarious retribution for the time and money people have spent to be ignored, mistreated or unsatisfied in a dining room.
Rayner writes in TheGuardian that it's the language that grips us.
"The vocabulary of the bad is just that much more enthralling," he says. "The negative toolbag is full to bursting."
Nuttall-Smith says he doesn't actually enjoy writing some of the negative reviews, and makes the distinction between two different types: there's the restaurant where it's evident they're trying very hard and just not making the cut, and then there's places like America.
Wells says he always tries to give credit when it's evident that an effort is being made, but agrees with the dividing line.
"A thing that can really make a critic mad is cynicism," he says.
Wells' Guy Fieri review was composed almost entirely of a series of absurd and acerbic questions. For example: "Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret...called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?" For Wells humour is an essential ingredient in a bad review.
"You try to make it fun for the reader..so I try to make myself laugh," Wells says. "It sounds kind of terrible that you're sitting at your computer laughing at this hatchet that you're wielding, but sometimes I do laugh."
He says that with the amount of attention the bad reviews garner it's tempting to skew more reports to the negative.
Entertaining is all well and good but Nuttall-Smith and Wells agree they have a duty to inform their readers both where they should go, and where they should not. Nuttall-Smith says he feels he also has a duty to Toronto and its restaurant scene.
"You're always hoping that you might, through what you write, make it a little better," he says.
