In 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can read here, we were introduced to the Italian Chef who decided that serving food at his restaurant was basically an outdated and backwards notion. Instead, he thought it was a better idea to make them eat some rancid cheese balls before making them watch the kitchen staff do shirtless BMX bike riding, and then force the unhappy guests to smile for a group picture with him.
Oh and I forgot. He also made the starving guests slurp a warm, frothy cum substitute out of a plaster made from his own mouth, which he also sells at the gift shop.
When we left off last time it was unclear to me if the chef was the absolute biggest Chad in the universe or the foodie most up his own ass. Well, after The Everywherist article went viral, the chef wrote back.
In the last few days, I wrote a review that escaped out of my hands and started running all over the internet, and it was not unlike that time when I was ten and my hamster got out of its cage and pooped everywhere. What I could not have imagined – what I at my most creative could never have foreseen, my sweet babies, was that the chef from Bros would reply to my review. I was not aware that blog posts merited rebuttals from chefs (this sort of thing never happens to Pete Wells.) (I am not, I realize, Pete Wells.) He demanded that his statement be printed in its entirety.
Just warning you goyim that this broad has a really annoying writing style. It doesn’t get much better, but I edit out the most annoying bits.
He began, as all good manifestos do, with a picture of a man on a horse.
Just like with the Jason “No White Guilt” Kohne series, where I figured I might try adding “disease stalks and hunts the living,” randomly into sentences like he does, I might just start adding this horse drawing everywhere.
And while the jury is still out, look at the feet. All the attention to detail in this image, and yet he “forgets,” to colour in 3 of the 4 horseshoes? Come on now, this has to be a troll.
In Chef Floriano’s rebuttal he explained that “Preparing food that is liked is like making a drawing of a man on a horse. It is not that hard, but most people will admire you.” He dismissively noted that “Many people are able to make good food. Your grandmother could do it. My wife does it great.” Which is a pretty condescending thing to say when your wife is one of the chefs at Bros.
CatNats take notes, this is wahmen hating in a way that’s actually funny. It’s hilarious because it’s fake, but the idiot writer of The Everywhereist is too simple to notice.
He then posted another image of a horse – this time it was Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Some people are master chefs, and have numerous Michelin stars, he wrote, and he likened this painting to those restaurants. But he’s “bored” with it.
At this point, I began to wonder what the hell was going on and what this had to do with food. It was like our meal at Bros, in manifesto form. I also found myself offended on behalf of a French neo-Classical painter who has been dead for two hundred years, because this week has been nothing but surprises.
What, you were surprised that a restaurant starved you, then made you lick that out of a recreation of the chef’s mouth without any utensils? SOMEONE hasn’t done enough fine dining.
Then came the last page of his response. Another painting, this one abstract, in which Chef Floriano waxed on about contemporary art. And he listed a series of philosophical questions which, had I included them in a fictionalized version of this story, would be removed by any decent editor on the grounds of being too unrealistic.
“What is art? What if food? (sic) What is a chef? What is a client? What is good taste? What looks beautiful?”
“What is a man on a horse?”
I still can’t be sure, but I’m thinking this has to be the world’s greatest performance piece, possibly ever. What this man is doing is indistinguishable from what I would do these absurdly full of shit and worthless people, only better. He’s fucking with these people, and the only question is if they’re grounded in reality enough not to fall for it.
It felt like he was trying to get himself declared incompetent to stand trial, and truly, well done, sir. Go commit more culinary crimes, no jury will convict you.
But the thing is, when I look past the misogyny, and arrogance, and the dripping condescension of the piece (and holy hell is there a lot of it) I actually agree with the statement that he’s making about art.
However, she does clarify later.
But a restaurant is not a museum, or an art gallery. If anything, the stakes are even higher, because you aren’t simply creating, you are creating something for someone. Every meal that comes out of the kitchen at Bros. is for a paying customer. It is for someone who has a minimum expectation of what a meal should be. A meal might be innovative, or cutting edge, or require a great deal of technical skill (and indeed, many of the dishes at Bros. were). But if it is insubstantial, or contains something that the customer is allergic to, or it simply doesn’t taste good, then what the hell does it matter if the chef thinks that he’s created art? He’s still failed at being a chef.
But beyond that, it’s a baffling sort of gatekeeping, to tell someone that the reason they didn’t enjoy a meal is that they didn’t understand art. That the reason the meal was awful was because we don’t appreciate the avant garde. It’s a sort of culinary gaslighting.
You’re not still hungry. You’re just hoi polloi.
Spoken like typical hoi polloi. Imagine not wanting to have your hands bound behind your back, blindfolded, and be forced, execution style to lick that frothy cream out of the mouth cup set on the floor with your ass sticking way up in the air?
Over the last week, I’ve been accused of not understanding a meal that I ate. By Chef Floriano in his rebuttal (where he doesn’t deign to call me by my name but instead refers to me as “Mrs. XXX” – an attempt to insult me which has inadvertently resulted in giving me the best nickname I’ve ever received). By Chef Isabella, as she laughingly said that we just “didn’t get it”.
But if one is to argue that appreciation of a meal lies in understanding the artistic vision behind it, then some onus is on the chef and the staff to communicate that vision to the patrons. They cannot simply turn their nose up at our questions and our dietary restrictions and later on, our criticisms. And even if those artistic explanations were provided, they still haven’t succeeded at creating a positive dining experience. Because as Dan notes here, “a meal needs to satisfy on a basic level.”
Just when this broad starts making a really cogent point, she brings up for the 90th time her group of precocious twats and their never ending list of dietary restrictions. I spared you most of this, but trust me, she brings this up constantly, to the point where even if the chef is really some dilating tranny with absolutely no idea what he’s doing, I’m still glad he served them this shitty meal that ruined their night.
I mean it’s fine to have dietary restrictions, but don’t go to a fucking Michelin star restaurant and start whining about how they’re not accommodating you. I mean it’s their restaurant. These ultra rich dipshits decided to drop $500 a plate on a meal that they couldn’t even eat.
And besides that, the beauty of good art and good food is this: you shouldn’t need to understand something to love it.
If food is a type of art, it is one that cannot exist without taking into account the relationship between the artist (the chef) and the consumer of their art (the client). Cooking, if done properly, is inherently an empathetic act. It’s an act of love. And if I am to reflect on all of the best meals that I’ve had – whether they were roadside stands or Michelin-starred restaurants, they shared one common theme: the person preparing the food cared about the people around them. They cared about their customers, and they cared about their staff. And that radiated through everything.
The chefs at Bros don’t seem to value empathy. They actually seem to eschew it.
It was at this moment, after finding Bros owner and head chef Floriano Pellegrino’s twatter account that I began to have a sinking feeling in my stomach. The constant mystery of “is this guy doing the world’s best trolling, or is he just even more full of shit than the bloggers,” shifted hard towards the latter.
Below I’ve found and uploaded a video of Floriano Pellegrino, and other chef Isabella Poti giving a masterclass in rancid flavours. Yes, you read that correctly. Their secret is they serve rotting food.
The video is 39 seconds of accidental parody of high class dining. I love how Isabella explains that she’s bringing x flavour based on y ethnicity, in this case Polish. This is a really common thing these people do, where they can’t just make food, it has to be because of some regional horseshit that goes back 900 years, whether true or not.
In her case it doesn’t even make much sense. She’s bloviating about fermentation coming “from [her] Polish side.” Honey, lots of cultures practice fermentation, but since Poles also do this, it’s far from the most objectionable bit.
That comes when Chef Pellegrino explicitly states “our special taste is rancidity.” Yes, the secret flavour is bacteria induced rot.
I take back everything I said about this guy being put in charge of executions in the ethnostate. I realize now my error. He was merely accidentally fucking with these people in hilarious ways. He’s just a rich idiot, who has covered up his gross incompetence by pretending that making horrible food is actually just him being visionary. So he’s not in fact running the world’s cleverest, and longest troll operation in all of human history.
I think.
But maybe?
We can never know for sure.
