FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Munchies

We Asked French Food Critics What They Think About Jay Rayner's Le Cinq Review

The Observer food critic branded the Michelin-starred Paris restaurant the “worst restaurant experience I have endured in my 18 years in this job.”

This article originally appeared on MUNCHIES France .

In last Sunday's edition of the Observer, British restaurant critic Jay Rayner reviewed Le Cinq, a three Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris, considered by many as the epitome of classic French dining. In Rayner's words, the review was meant to be "an observational piece, full of moments of joy and bliss, of the sort only stupid amounts of cash can buy. We'd all have a good laugh at rich people and then return to business as usual, a little wiser." What could possibly go wrong?

What he ended up writing was probably one of the meanest restaurant reviews in history.

From the moment Rayner stepped through the doors of this "classic Parisian gastro-palace," things seemed to go wrong. Le Cinq's dining room, he wrote, was decorated in "various shades of taupe, biscuit, and fuck you." His female dining companion was given a menu without prices. When a confused waiter replaced it with one that included costs, they found out that a single plate of food was between 70 and 140 Euros. That works out to as much as £120 for a single plate of food.

It gets worse. The canape was "like eating a condom that's been left lying about in a dusty greengrocer's." The gratinated onions were "mostly black, like nightmares, and sticky, like the floor at a teenager's party" and the scallops tasted like iodine. The whole thing really is worth a read, in a craning-your-neck-to-look-at-a-very-expensive-car-crash kind of way.

Read more on MUNCHIES.