Geraldine DeRuiter describes her horrendously memorable meal at Bros, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Lecce, Italy ("Cost: a rather mortifying 130-200 Euros per person"). She said it was "one of the worse wastes of money in my entire food and travel writing career."
The main course was a "tablespoon of crab" served in an indentation on a whimsical clay plot. Other "courses" included a "paper-thin fish cracker," a "sliver of oyster loaf with foam," a "teaspoon of olive ice cream," and a citrus foam resembling vomit "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."
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. 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.
This beat's Rob's Nello experience!
