A restaurant review - served with vitriol!

I've just enjoyed one of the most vitriolic restaurant reviews I've ever had the pleasure of reading.  The reviewer, in true English style, does his thing with a certain amount of delicacy - but he can't resist twisting the knife as he slips it between the ribs.  Here's how it begins.

Guys, no one could deny that your restaurant, Ten Room, has its trifling flaws – which of us doesn’t? But please be reassured that there is nothing wrong with it that would not be corrected by the application of a medium-sized demolition ball.

Don’t tinker, don’t tweak, do not fiddle. Rip it up, as Orange Juice advised in their 1982 hit single, and start again. Obliterate this monstrosity, and rebuild from scratch. Rebuild it, and they might come. Fail to do so, and the eating public will give it such a wide berth that its banquettes will be as empty as the Muscovite steppe.

For it was Soviet-era Moscow that initially struck us as the template: gloomy film-noir jazz on the speakers, bronzed railings on the banisters of the overhanging mezzanine, an aura of cultivated sterility. Technically, this is less a restaurant than part hotel foyer, part storage room for unwanted furniture, in which food happens, for no apparent reason, to be served. So potent was the Eighties Intourist vibe that I kept glancing around nervously for our KGB minder.

. . .

Four chairs lined up by a window dispelled the Soviet analogy by hinting at the waiting room of an IVF clinic, or possibly the Dignitas HQ in Zurich. “They haven’t a clue how to make this place look like something,” said my friend. “What are those pillars doing over there?” he went on, pointing at a row of shoulder-high marble spikes between the eating area and the door. We contemplated this demented arrangement, and decided that the only purpose can be to stop customers stampeding like terrified cattle for the exit.

There's more at the link.  It's a classic, acerbic demolition job!





Peter