Have you ever been to an expensive restaurant that turned out to be a total rip-off? Well, let me tell you what, no matter how bad your experience was, it wasn’t as bad as what happened to the restaurant blogger Geraldine DeRuiter and her party at Bros, a Michelin-starred foo-foo restaurant in Lecce, Italy. But she got her revenge, penning an epic takedown of the joint. Here’s how it begins:

There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it’s so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement. The sort of meal where everyone involved was definitely trying to do something; it’s just not entirely clear what.

I’m not talking about a meal that’s poorly cooked, or a server who might be planning your murder—that sort of thing happens in the fat lump of the bell curve of bad. Instead, I’m talking about the long tail stuff – the sort of meals that make you feel as though the fabric of reality is unraveling. The ones that cause you to reassess the fundamentals of capitalism, and whether or not you’re living in a simulation in which someone failed to properly program this particular restaurant. The ones where you just know somebody’s going to lift a metal dome off a tray and reveal a single blue or red pill.

I’m talking about those meals.

At some point, the only way to regard that sort of experience—without going mad—is as some sort of community improv theater. You sit in the audience, shouting suggestions like, “A restaurant!” and “Eating something that resembles food” and “The exchange of money for goods, and in this instance the goods are a goddamn meal!” All of these suggestion go completely ignored.

That is how I’ve come to regard our dinner at Bros, Lecce’s only Michelin-starred restaurant, as a means of preserving what’s left of my sanity. It wasn’t dinner. It was just dinner theater.

No, scratch that. Because dinner was not involved. I mean—dinner played a role, the same way Godot played a role in Beckett’s eponymous play. The entire evening was about it, and guess what? IT NEVER SHOWED.

Bros is a modernist cuisine place. They served DeRuiter and her friends a 27-course dinner that took hours, and barely featured any food. More:

There is no menu at Bros. Just a blank newspaper with a QR code linking to a video featuring one of the chefs, presumably, against a black background, talking directly into the camera about things entirely unrelated to food. He occasionally used the proper noun of the restaurant as an adverb, the way a Smurf would. This means that you can’t order anything besides the tasting menu, but also that you are at the mercy of the servers to explain to you what the hell is going on.

The servers will not explain to you what the hell is going on.

Rand tries to figure out what part of this dish is edible.

He cannot.

They will not do this in Italian. They will not do this in English. They will not play Pictionary with you on the blank newspaper as a means of communicating what you are eating. On the rare occasion where they did offer an explanation for a dish, it did not help.

“These are made with rancid ricotta,” the server said, a tiny fried cheese ball in front of each of us.

“I’m… I’m sorry, did you say rancid? You mean… fermented? Aged?”

“No. Rancid.”

“Okay,” I said in Italian. “But I think that something might be lost in translation. Because it can’t be-”

“Rancido,” he clarified.

Trust me, my dears, you are going to want to read the whole thing. 

There are no words to describe the alchemy with which DeRuiter has transformed this miserable experience into revenge comedy. Her party spent four and a half hours, and over $200 per person, and walked away hungry, perplexed, and angry.

I found out about this because The New York Times ran a story on how the DeRuiter review went viral, and brought everybody out of the woodwork to complain about what pretentious con artists the restaurant’s chef-owner, Floriano Pellegrino, and his chef wife, Isabella Poti, are. And lo, it seems to be true! Excerpt:

Ms. Potì’s culinary chops and cheek bones (“Isabella has this face,” Mr. Pellegrino noted) have attracted fashion magazines and collaborations with Nike. While she is a polyglot, the chiseled Mr. Pellegrino doesn’t really speak English. But he does say “Hey, bro” to just about everyone, is inked with some questionable Bros-centric tattoos that some would regard as misogynistic and loves the F-word so much that he used it on the boxes of his Christmas panettones.

They have promotional deals with sunglass companies, ice cream bars, their own rugby team and a clothing brand. They have filmed videos for their menus as Adam and Eve, clad only in strategically placed leaves. A video for Bros’ summer 2021 menu came with an epilepsy warning.

“Why are us chefs only chefs?” Mr. Pellegrino said. “If I’m able to do other things, why only cook?”

This pair could have wandered in out of Paolo Sorrentino’s homage to Roman decadence, “The Great Beauty”. Well done, Geraldine DeRuiter! I’m going to bookmark her blog, The Everywhereist.