I thought I might have been the only food writer to use prophylactics to describe undesirable cuisine until I stumbled on this Huffington Post article. The story compiles blurbs from the 10 most meanspirited reviews they could find across the NY Times, The Guardian, GQ and other publications.
I still prefer the visual simplicity of likening the disassembly of a chicken crisper to the act of removing a spent condom, but Matthew Norman's visual of a Trojan pulled over a garlic press "the day timetable confusion forced the cookery teacher to take sex education at short notice," may be considered a bit more lyrical by some.
It gets worse...
Michael Kaminer called Joanne Trattoria the worst thing since herpes; Pete Wells describes a beef carpacio dish as tasting of refrigeration and surrender; and A.A. Gill coins L'Ami Louis the worst restaurant in the world.
Each of those is pretty harsh, but they don't seen as mean spirited as Hanna Raskin's comparison of the Common Table's dry veal sliders to mastodon meat, or Katherine Shillcut's likening of a deconstructed salmon tamale to a trinket in the Thanksgiving decoration aisle at Hobby Lobby.
And you thought Yelpers were mean.
