English Version | “Good food is very often, even most often, simple food” - Anthony Bourdain

Hold onto your seats, this is going to be painful. The multiple dimensions of food criticism, that mister, are going to be unveiled. It’s a whole new meaning to the cliché “words hurt more than actions” since there have been many chefs that have committed suicide after a negative review of one of their dishes. We’re talking about the loss of whole lives simply because of the description of “bland”, But there’s a lot worse than that.

“Who does he think he* is?” has to be the most common expression used by a chef after they’ve read a negative review of their tasting menu on any paper. The asterisc is because in its place could be any number of offenses “son of a b@tch of a c@cksucker of your aunt’s p@ssy” because yes, the vernacular is the honey that sweetens the communication in a kitchen, a place that, in terms of stress, outpowers Wall Street. This would easily be resolved if the recruitment process of a food critic by a media outlet was simplified: frying an egg. No, it’s not that simple. It’s actually really complicated in the way we, like common mortals that gave our first creative gastronomic steps with tuna rice that was the best we’ve ever had (and that we've never been able to recreate), have no idea the years of work and the number of sacrifices that are behind one, just one, Michelin star. That’s why we might go to a renowned chef’s restaurant and complain “an egg cooked at a low temperature? That’s just underdone dude”. But the critic is privy to certain information. They know the chef started out as a simple kitchen porter in small restaurants, that they had a small drug addiction problem just to be able to bear the infinite long hours of work and zero sleep, that didn’t go to his mother’s funeral and that ended up divorcing and losing custody of his kids because no one is capable of having shared life with someone that is simply never at home. All of this to achieve the peak of their career. A dream. And then, there’s the small detail that, a food critic, because they write for a living, should dominate the written word. The choice one makes when it comes to vocabulary should then be considered intentional. It required ponderation. Bad criticism is, because of this fact, sometimes, just pure evil. It comes out of a mere annoyance, a whim. But there’s an obvious intent on hurting. That is what usually happens. There’s a name for people that take on this attitude, usually directed to the mothers of those who have it. And it's not a pretty one. We shan’t mention it since this is not the kitchen of a restaurant.

The movie industry gives us an insight into the weight the words of a food critic can have in a chef’s life. Even the seemingly innocent Ratatouille (2007) portrays it, with the fearful Anton Ego having the same role as the Evil Queen in Snow White. The twist the plot ends up making isn’t relevant, and to reveal it would be to spoil the movie, and one shouldn’t miss the chance to watch a “kid’s movie” with such valuable lessons for adults. Another example, is the movie Chef (2014), directed by Jon Favreau, where Favreau plays the main character, Carl Jasper, the chef responsible for a top restaurant in California that is fired because of a negative critique from the famous journalist Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt). What happens next is a road trip through the United States to rediscover the passion for cuisine and (almost) starting from zero, with a food truck, allowing the main character to have complete creative freedom, accompanied by his underage son and a small crew. The overbearing beauty of The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), directed by Lasse Hallström, the same director from Chocolate, portrays the life of the Kadam family, forced to look for a refugee in a small town in the South of France after watching their family restaurant destroyed in their hometown in India. That’s the moment they decide to open an establishment similar to the familiar tandoori, with extremely decorated walls that characterize them, spreading the spice scent for kilometers around. The problem is, approximately one hundred steps away from it, is the very sophisticated restaurant owned by Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), which has one Michelin star. Unfairly unknown, Boiling Point (2021) is a true incursion, that lasts only for a night, the most important one of the year at that, of a top restaurant through a single shot that lasts ninety minutes. It begins with a health inspection that detects some hygiene problems and everything that follows portrays the emotional instability that characterizes establishments like that, with random emotional explosions and, of course, the titular “boiling point” of the chef (Stephen Graham), after a tv show brings a famous food critic to dine at the restaurant. Maybe the most intense movie on this theme is Burnt (2015), where Bradley Cooper plays Adam Jones, a chef that lives on the edge trying to get his third Michelin star. It’s a trip to the demanding world of fine dining, where all the excesses are comas, small acts can have terrible repercussions, old betrayals are avenged and, of course, a bad review can have devastating consequences. Because, in a world as demanding as the high cuisine one, there’s only one thing as hard as getting one, two, or even three Michelin stars… keeping them. Once the honor is given to a restaurant, the Michelin Guide makes a point to visit the establishments annually to check the standards are still being met, through inspectors that make themselves known with a set of ticks, like purposely dropping a utensil, just to check if the staff is attentive enough to notice them. And once you reach that peak, a place where only the crème de la crème can be found, it's obvious that losing that honor has devastating consequences. For the chef or owner of a restaurant, it’s a true tragedy. That often leads to others.

Bernard Loiseau, born in Chamalieres, France, in 1951, spent his childhood in the kitchen with his mom. At 14 he was already working as a chef and climbed the ladder until he reached the famous La Maison Troisgros. In 1972 he started working as the head chef alongside Claude Verger, one of the founders of Nouvelle Cuisine and an entrepreneur in the restaurant business, in La Barriere de Clichy, in Paris. In 1974, the chef acquired another Parisian establishment, the La Barriere Poquelin, and made Loiseau head chef once again. A year later he bought, in Saulieu, a small village in the French countryside, the restaurant La Côte d’Or (now known as Le Relais Bernard Loiseau) that, under the guidance of Loiseau, won the very first Michelin star in 1977. In just five years it got its second one, and in 1991, reached the highest honor in the world of cuisine. In 1995 he was handed, from President François Mitterand, the Legion of Honour, making him the second chef to ever gain that recognition. The first was, in 1975, Paul Bocuse, considered the master of all masters of Nouvelle Cuisine, a term that, funnily enough, was coined by Henry Gault, a French food critic, to describe the meals prepared by the chef for the inaugural flight of the Concorde, in1969. In 2002, the Restaurant Guide Gault Millau, the same one that brought Loiseau’s name to Verger’s attention in the 70s, downgraded the score of the La Côte d’Or, from a 19/20 to a 17/20. Following this event, the important paper Le Figaro, the main driving force behind the Asian fusion wave that was taking over French cuisine, and against which Loiseau fought (a resistance that earned him several articles accusing him of being “outdated”), was published a text that materialized a rumor: the Michelin Guide was to take one of the restaurant’s stars. On February 24th of 2003, Bernard Loiseau committed suicide with a gunshot to the head, after attending the lunch shift. He was 52 years old.

An essential name, the most rock n’ roll chef of all times, and an absolute icon, Anthony Bourdain, also confesses, in his book Kitchen Confidential (2000), the pressure that reviews can have on a chef’s life. After much suffering, Bourdain found a genius way to go around bad reviews: shut down all the restaurants he went by. For the 25 years when he was a chef in New York, he managed to take them all to forced closure. How? Just read his descriptions of a workday in any given kitchen, that he compared to the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. How, before the shift started, he would join his sous-chefs for “a stew of dope, amphetamines, and overwork.” In the end, they would pour brandy over a plaque so it would catch fire. When all of this was done, did he go to sleep? Of course not, He would rub shoulders with the Mobd, tended to his heroin addiction and maybe the next day would boast his knife and demi-glaces skills. “These were happy days”, he mentioned. He thought of his career as a failure. But for us, the ones that worship him knew what was beyond this. Bourdain hated all of this folklore that high cuisine became associated with. To him, food was a matter of stomach, not an aesthetic one, of plating and everything that surrounds that approach. It must be terrible to be a true taverner stuck in the United States, where meat comes in plastic and the fish is already breaded on the shelves of the grocery store. So he went around the world, to taste everything with everyone, make political analysis, blend in with the cultures, enjoying what life has to give, after so many years of suffering the chaos of burning hot kitchens. These were “happy days”, ours, with the various shows Bourdain had on Travel Channel. Letting the poetry he carried in him free, when he visited Portugal for the first time he said: “Everything old is new again? Maybe not. I’d come close sometimes to believing that nothing actually ever changes, that we are trapped in our destiny, hurtling or limping or being dragged towards the inevitable. That Saudade refers not to a long-lost place but a long-lost time when we were all young and innocent.” I have never tasted anything that was made by Anthony Bourdain. But I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that he shined the brightest in a notebook, writing about food. A chef that, finally, after so many years in the business, writes about food in a way no food critic ever could. What takes a man that, reaping all the benefits from the comfort his status provided, can now do what he truly loves in life… put an end to it?

One day, Pete Wells, the food critic from the New York Times, sat at the table of one of New York’s taste symbols, the Per Se, owned by Thomas Keller. On that fourth floor of Time Warner Center, in Manhattan, the chef Chad Palagi managed to attain three Michelin stars. Ony on that faithful day in 2006, Wells described the dumplings as “soggy and uninteresting” and soup as “bong water”. Jay Rayner, that manages to be one of the funniest food critics, making reviews as if writing for a Fox sitcom, walked into a restaurant from the Léon de Bruxelles’ chain, famous for their moules frites (mussels and french fries), and described one of the unfortunate mollusks as “small, wrinkled and dry. Each shell hides within it a hairless cat’s scrotum.” AA Gil was known as The Savage. The restaurant 66, in New York, shut down after his review where he referred to the shrimp and foie gras dumplings as “fishy liver-filled condoms” and the food, in general, had “a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.” But for those that think this is but a men’s world, there’s nothing quite like finding out that Tina Nguyen wrote, for Vanity Fair, about the restaurant owned by the former President of the United States, the Trump Grill: “an eyeball tasted better than the Trump Grill’s (Grille’s) Gold Label Burger.” But not all food critics have the gift of writing. In fact, very few actually do. Gone are the days they started their career in a local newspaper, commenting on the shrimp of a local seafood restaurant, or the fact that, since Miss Ercilia isn’t in the kitchen of the Café Central it hasn’t been the same. If they earned it, they would get a bigger weekly column in the capital, with so much work they actually would write their opinions on grilled sardines from the Feira Popular, until the most anticipated time of the year would come, lamprey season in Solar dos Presuntos, one of the best restaurants in town. Today, however, the flock of bloggers has stained a job that, once upon a time, was, if not respected, at least feared. I too love to eat. But I would be incapable of writing certain things just to get a free meal to impress a girlfriend. Or end someone’s career just because there was a hair in my soup or a cockroach in the bathroom. How I miss Martim Moniz’s underground Chinese restaurants.

Originally translated from Vogue Portugal's The Quote Issue, published April 2022.For full credits and stories, check the print version.