Food for Thought

A A Gill is my fave ever restaurant critic. Hannah thinks it strange that anyone should have a fave restaurant critic but, hey, strange is OK.

Check out this in a review from Budapest:

What it did have was gypsy violinists. Ah, now I remember what Hungary’s famous for. The most stressful thing in the entire world is to be shut in a room with a questing gypsy violinist. In terms of naked anxiety, it’s way beyond your phone going off during Hamlet’s soliloquy, swimming with jellyfish, or getting dressed up in a Formula One bondage costume in the back of a cab between traffic lights. I watched the great white violinist and the midget accordionist saw their way through the tables of tourists. He circled a hapless Korean couple. They shrank in terror and numb incomprehension as his fat, malevolently bland face, with its slick black pate and golden grin, loomed over them. He winked a terrifyingly dull eye that rolled back in his head and with one fluid movement, too fast to decipher, he was among them with Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. It was horrible. Shrieking notes of psychotic dexterity, wringing screaming tremolos and pitiful vibratos from every riff. The air was filled with sentimental death. There is no known defence against an adult male gypsy violinist in an enclosed space: in a Hungarian restaurant, no one can hear you scream.

Now isn't that just sublimely, violently, incisively cruel? Beautiful.

... and then, when he eventually gets round to writing about the restaurant under review (the above one was an aside!):

I’m going to get the food out of the way as quickly as possible, because that was the only way to eat it, and I really don’t want to dwell on the liver tart, an offal brick. The artichoke and smoked salmon salad was plainly the result of a shoplifting sprint to an all-night supermarket; the lamb was a soggy brown muscle. Hopefully the monkfish will have kept its vow of celibacy and not produced any more like it. There was something with lavender ice cream on the top, the colour of melted Barbies, that tasted like a pensioner’s knicker drawer.

That is good writing indeed.