Who would win in a battle between some of the most insufferable and intolerable people of all time?
The Everywhereist:
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.
Trust me goyim, she’s had quite a few meals. This fatty saying this restaurant was her worst meal of all time is like a crackwhore saying you’re the smallest cock she’s ever taken.
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 including this only so you know the quality of writing I had to sit through. No, it doesn’t get better, and yes, I will skip to the relevant bits. I’m actually making this more tolerable for you.
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.
Having said that, this insufferable twat actually has a point here. High quality food is like high quality fashion. It’s one of those weird industries where there’s lots of legitimately amazing stuff, and an equally high amount of truly intolerable hackery. This restaurant is one of the latter.
I realize that not everyone is willing or able to afford a ticket to Waiting for Gateau and so this post exists, to spare you our torment. We had plenty of beautiful meals in Lecce that were not this one, and if you want a lovely meal out, I’ll compile a list shortly.
But for now, let us rehash whatever the hell this was.
We headed to the restaurant with high hopes – eight of us in total, led into a cement cell of a room, Drake pumping through invisible speakers. It was sweltering hot, and no other customers were present. The décor had the of chicness of an underground bunker where one would expect to be interrogated for the disappearance of an ambassador’s child.
Imagine spending $300 a plate, only for Drake to be playing through the speakers. This is what I mean by Hack vs Faggot fight. As I read this article I was taken on an unforgettable rollercoaster of emotion as I found myself at one moment cheering for the restaurant staff to ruin these faggots days, but then the head chef would become too much of a twat and I became mad again.
What followed was a 27-course meal (note that “course” and “meal” and “27” are being used liberally here) which spanned 4.5 hours and made me feel like I was a character in a Dickensian novel. Because – I cannot impart this enough – there was nothing even close to an actual meal served. Some “courses” were slivers of edible paper. Some shots were glasses of vinegar. Everything tasted like fish, even the non-fish courses. And nearly everything, including these noodles, which was by far the most substantial dish we had, was served cold.
See this is where you might start to feel sorry for these people. After all, sure, they run a blog called “The Everywhereist,” and sure, the wahmen is obese and snarky, and sure, her husband is probably homosexual, and sure, they can afford travel and eat at Michelin star restaurants. But ultimately, nobody deserves such a shitty meal.
Amassing two-dozen of them together amounted to a meal the same way amassing two-dozen toddlers together amounts to one middle-aged adult.
And then this dumb broad says something like this. Honey, two dozen toddlers would weigh more than a single middle aged adult. Considerably more. We’re talking 3 year olds here, how much do you think they weigh, 7 pounds? With an average weight of 40 lbs, 24 toddlers works out to 960lbs of childflesh.
So apparently this broad was given enough rations for 960 lbs worth of human, and is assmad that she didn’t get enough to eat. “Oh my gawd I was practically being starved to death.”
Except that actually, she didn’t get enough to eat, she just also sucks at math and is basically retarded. Below is one of the “courses,” they offered. It’s a single fish cracker.
Yes, that’s correct. A. Single. Fish. Cracker.
I’ve tried to come up with hypotheses for what happened. Maybe the staff just ran out of food that night. Maybe they confused our table with that of their ex-lover’s. Maybe they were drunk. But we got twelve kinds of foam, something that I can only describe as “an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport”, and a teaspoon of savory ice cream that was olive flavored.
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.
Imagine if the chef was /ourgoy/? He dedicates his life to fucking over these insufferable faggots, making sure to ruin at least one of their nights. Then he talks in the most absurd, over the top way, just to see how utterly full of shit they are for going along with it.
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.
This really is privileged class pseudo-culture in a nutshell. “I’m superior to the little peasants, because they don’t like rancid ricotta fried cheese balls.”
Another course – a citrus foam – was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. Absent utensils, we were told to lick it out of the chef’s mouth in a scene that I’m pretty sure was stolen from an eastern European horror film.
I dunno, looks appetizing.
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I checked, and it’s true. Personally, I love the two tiny pictures of the chef’s mouth plaster in random directions on the left. Like the mouths are staring off into the distance.
Now, at this point, I may have started quietly freaking out. A hierarchical pecking order was being established, and when you’re the one desperately slurping sustenance out of the plaster cast of someone else’s mouth, it’s safe to say you are at the bottom of that pyramid.
This is what I mean when I say that even if it isn’t true, it’s hilarious to think of the chef being some retired rich guy who spends all his time fucking with these people. “Eat gross foam out of my fucking mouth plaster you narcissitic cunts,” is pretty much 100% what I would make these people do if I was made emperor of the universe. Even better than deradicalization camps.
What follows is the weirdest version of Stockholm Syndrome I have ever seen.
We’d been beaten into some sort of weird psychological submission. Like the Stanford Prison Experiment but with less prison and more aspic. That’s the only reason I have for why we didn’t leave during any of these incidents:
- When a member of our party stood up during the lengthy stretch between courses to go have a cigarette outside, and was scolded to sit down.
- When one member of our party was served nothing for three consecutive courses, because they couldn’t figure out how to accommodate her food allergies.
- When Rand was served food he was allergic to, repeatedly, because they didn’t care enough to accommodate his.
- When a server reprimanded me for eating. These reconstituted orange slices (one per person) were a course. I asked if I could eat the real orange that had been served alongside it (we’d all gotten one, and I, at this point, was extremely hungry). “Yes,” the server said, annoyed. “But you aren’t really supposed to.” He let me have two segments and then whisked the fruit away.
No, we just sat there while the food was portioned out a teaspoon at a time, a persistent and sustained sort of agony, like slowly peeling off a band-aid. That’s the problem with a tasting menu. With so many courses, you just assume things are going to turn around. Every dish is a chance for redemption. Maybe this meal was like Nic Cage’s career – you have to wait a really long time for the good stuff, but there is good stuff.
BUT NO. We kept waiting for someone to bring us something – anything! – that resembled dinner. Until the exact moment when we realized: it would never come. It was when our friend Lisa tried to order another bottle of wine.
“Would you like red or white?” the server asked.
“What are we having for the main?” she inquired.
His face blanched.
“The… main, madame? Um… we’re about to move on to dessert.”
We sat for a moment, letting this truth settle over us.
Look this broad didn’t get to a cool 400 lbs by skipping meals. Methinks you’re about to make the American-Sized Guests hangry. And you won’t like them when they’re hangry.
“There’s no … main?” Lisa said to us in disbelief after the server had retreated.
“Hey,” I said, my hand resting on her arm. She was shaking slightly from low blood sugar. “It’s okay.”
Oh Jesus.
“They haven’t fucking fed us,” she said, her eyes wide.
Oh god.
“I know, I know,” I said, “But look. We’re in this amazing country. And I don’t know about you, but nothing is going to stop me from enjoying tonight.”
She nodded.
“Because I’m surrounded by my favorite people,” I said, and I squeezed Lisa’s hand for emphasis, “and I’m at my favorite restaurant.”
Lisa sputtered laughing. No more food was coming, but there was something freeing in that. Because this meal had never been about us to begin with. It sure as hell wasn’t about the food. And there is something glorious about finally giving up.
Yeah something tells me that Lisa is going to make it through a single night without food. Or maybe even a medevil siege.
And then someone came in and demanded we stand and exit the restaurant. Thinking we were getting kicked out, we gleefully followed. Instead, we were led across the street, to a dark doorway and into the Bros laboratory. A video of the shirtless kitchen staff doing extreme sports played on a large screen TV while a chef cut us comically tiny slivers of fake cheese.
This… this has to be a troll right? Nobody is so far up their own ass that they run a restaurant that doesn’t feed people, but instead forces them to watch the shirtless kitchen staff do MMA or something. Man, we need to hire this guy to do executions in the Ethnostate.
The bill arrived. The meal cost more than any other we’d eat during our trip by a magnitude of three. They’d given us balloons with the restaurant’s name across it and the chef emerged and insisted on posing with us for a Polaroid that we did not ask for. We were finally released into the night, after every other restaurant had closed, ensuring that no food would be consumed that evening.
Look I’m not saying this chef is /ourgoy/, I’m just saying that he’s doing everything that I would have done in that exact same situation. Including getting a picture with the shitlibs he just trolled the absolute shit out of.
In fact, let’s recap. He managed to not serve these people any real amount of food, while making them suck a cum-substitute out of his mouth plaster after eating some rancid cheese, and then made them watch his bros play sports. I’m starting to think this guy might actually be running some sort of experiment on these people.
I’m surprised he didn’t tie their hands behind their backs and make them eat out of a trough. A trough that was just a 10x life sized recreation of his mouth.
But this is a two parter, because the chef, who is either the biggest Chad in the entire world, or the most hilariously full of shit con-artist, maybe even both, writes her back. And he also draws horses.
It’s fantastic. Tune in for part 2.
One of my favorite articles I’ve encountered online.
[…] part 1 of this story, which you can read here, we were introduced to the Italian Chef who decided that serving food at his restaurant was […]