A New York City institution, Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn has been at the top of steak restaurant game since it opened in 1887. In 2002 it was added to the James Beard Foundation's list of America's Classics and throughout the years, it was praised for its consistency and quality. All was well until critic Pete Wells stopped by in 2019...
In his review for The New York Times, Wells gave the restaurant a zero-star rating, writing "After I've paid, there is the unshakeable sense that I've been scammed". He continued to compare his visit to all the previous times he's eaten there since the 1990s. "I know there was a time the German fried potatoes were brown and crunchy [...]. Now they are mushy, dingy, grey and sometimes cold," he said before he criticised the quality of the ingredients, including the steak itself.
New Yorkers were quick to react to Wells' review – some in disbelief, some in denial, but most in agreement. Many also wrote to The New York Times to thank Pete Wells for finally speaking the truth. The restaurant's general manager David Berson responded to the damning review in a statement to Eater New York: "We know who we are and have always been. The best steak you can eat. Not the latest kale salad."
When Gordon Ramsay announced he was opening a new restaurant in London for the first time in more than five years, there was much excitement. That is until the restaurant finally opened and Grace Dent's 2019 review in The Guardian described it as "unremarkable sort-of-Japanese food".
Dent's review described the smoked short rib as "bland" and "flabby", the monkfish cheek katsu as "fiercely fishy and semi-inedible", and said the pineapple rum baba felt "microwaved: chewy and hot in some places, in others not". She also called the restaurant out for the outrageous prices: "[..] teensy plate of prawn toast (pictured) had just arrived: four circular, 50p-sized lumps of prawn toast laced with sesame kimchi for eight quid.[..] At these prices, everything should be exquisite, which it very much is not."
Other writers weren't any more generous with their opinions either. The Evening Standard's Fay Maschler said: "Much hoo-ha, but [...] fails to seduce."
New York Times critic Pete Wells isn’t known for mincing his words and he certainly didn’t hold back in his 2012 review of Guy Fieri’s (now closed) New York restaurant. “Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square”, he wrote, before completing the entire review in a series of 34 rhetorical questions. “Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste?” is among the most damning of his comments.
TV personality Fieri (pictured) said of the review on The Today Show, "I thought it was ridiculous. To me [he] went so overboard, it really seemed like there was another agenda."
Known for his controversial style, food and travel writer A. A. Gill was ruthless in his 2003 Vanity Fair review of New York’s 66. He kicked off the review by picking apart the restaurant's interior, referring to it as “blank emptiness” and “a bit of a disappointment”. Then he really went to town on the shrimp and foie gras dumplings: “What if we called them fishy liver-filled condoms. They were properly vile, with a savour that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.”
Understandably, the unforgiving article upset the owner. “This is satire,” restaurateur Phil Suarez (on the right) said. “This is not the restaurant that all of our clients have gone to.” The staff were reportedly convinced this was Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s personal vendetta after he walked out of the restaurant a couple of months before.
In a 2014 review titled “Tavern on The Green Is a Bad Restaurant”, Ryan Sutton, chief critic of Eater New York, laid his claws straight into chef Katy Spark’s food. He described aubergines (eggplants) as devoid of flavour and declared that the Gruyère and goats' cheese sandwiches “boast[ed] more grease than a lube job”.
Six years on, Tavern on the Green has executive chef Bill Peet leading the team, while food writer and critic Ryan Sutton continues to write no-holds-barred reviews for Eater New York.
In 1998, Box Tree was considered by many to be one of Manhattan’s most romantic restaurants, yet critic Ruth Reichl failed to be won over. In her review for The New York Times she wrote, “Today the Box Tree is a pretentious place serving fancy, not very good Continental food.”
Reviewing the London branch of the famous New York restaurant Balthazar for The Times in 2013, Giles Coren was determined to tell readers what he thought about restaurants moving over from the US. “New York is the place that most of the knock-offs come from, because gastronomic London is still in the throes of a misguided and tragically one-sided fling with the Big Asshole”, he said. He also tore into the lukewarm food and a tarte tatin which resembled “a soggy beer mat”.
Restaurateur Keith McNally, who opened Balthazar in London, responded to the review in a statement to Eater. He said it was written “so clearly for controversy’s sake”. He divulged that he was warned Coren “might use the review to make an exaggerated dig at New York”.
Founding Farmers describes itself as an "urban farmhouse" but when Tom Sietsema reviewed it in 2016 for the Washington Post, he had trouble seeing the restaurant’s farm-to-table philosophy realised in its food.
“Witness a skillet of cornbread, bright with corn kernels but also doughy in the centre, and pickled 'seasonal' vegetables that turn out to be mostly sliced cucumbers,” he wrote. The key to survival, he said, is to order a sazerac: "It will help you forget what you’re about to eat, or at least keep you much better company than the cooking.”
The second of A. A. Gill's reviews on this list is his 1998 write-up of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant Aubergine, in which he described Ramsay as “a failed sportsman who acts like an 11-year-old”.
Gordon Ramsay responded by later throwing out Gill and his party, including actress Joan Collins (pictured), of his Chelsea restaurant. He then published a written response defending his staff and saying that “personal attacks and insulting my staff is something I'm not putting up with... I have made it quite clear that he is not welcome at my restaurant”.
Ramsay left Aubergine, which closed in 2010, the same year and is now owner of 39 restaurants around the world. His establishments have been awarded a total of 16 Michelin stars and currently hold a total of seven. Apparently, the feud with Gill ended in 2003 with the pair both confirming it was water under the bridge, however, it’s said that Gill never dined at any of Ramsay’s restaurants again.
What started as a prank, ended up as a semi-serious review of Olive Garden in LA Weekly. Journalist Jonathan Gold questioned everything from an overheated Tuscan soup to “a plate of aubergine (eggplant) parmigiana that consisted of crunchy aubergine Pringles bound with leathery straps of mozzarella”. As for the famous breadsticks, he dubbed them “doughy things slicked with grease and oil”.
Jay Rayner's review of renowned three-star Michelin restaurant Le Cinq in Paris made waves in the culinary world in 2017. He referred to his experience as “by far the worst” in his 18-year-long career as a critic. Among his most damning comments were describing a canapé as a “Barbie-sized silicone breast implant" and declaring that the pigeon “might fly again given a few volts”.
After receiving much abuse on social media, Rayner’s review was also widely criticised by French media. Le Figaro deemed the review a violent attack and “tailor-made for creating buzz”, while Libération wrote that he “came to make fun of a French chef”.
The review is definitely not forgotten and in 2018 Jay Rayner published a collection of his most damning reviews in a book, Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights. The restaurant, which usually responds to every negative TripAdvisor review personally, preferred not to give an official comment. A Le Cinq staff member (staff pictured here with head chef Christian Le Squer) told Eater that "this isn't criticism, it's entertainment".
In her Vanity Fair review of Trump Grill in 2016, Tina Nguyen wrote: “Renowned butcher Pat LaFrieda once dared me to eat an eyeball that he himself popped out of the skull of a roasted pig. That eyeball tasted better than the Trump Grill’s Gold Label Burger.” She continued by describing the guacamole as something NASA would’ve served in a tube in the early days of the space programme before suggesting that the cocktails “seemed to be concocted by a college freshman experimenting in their dorm”.
Naturally, Donald Trump took to Twitter to voice his opinion: “Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!”
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It seems that the feud between Donald Trump and Vanity Fair's ex-editor Graydon Carter is nowhere near resolution as the pair have been at each other’s throats since the late 1980s. It all started with Carter writing about Trump's hands as "small and neatly groomed" in a GQ cover story, while Trump has continuously voiced his opinion on Twitter, describing Carter as "dummy", "sissy", "sloppy" and "a major loser".