Cry me a river, gastro boy

When you believe yourself to be a Gastro Boy and you get treated as a normal customer and don't feel oh so special

Floating Sinequanon bottles in a wine shop, London, October 2022

Prologue

This is a story that may or may not have some ties with reality. It may have been inspired by a real article from a real journalist, who wrote about his perceived experience in one of the temples of gastronomy.

Or not.

It doesn’t really matter, in fact.

Because for me, this story is a pretext, a good excuse to discuss something with you, my handful of readers.

Not all experiences are good, as it seems from the tale I am about to tell you. But as in everything, it matters more the way we look at things than the thing itself.

Truth is, when we read gastronomic articles, critics or opinions, oftentimes we can read more about the author in what and how they tell a story.

This tale is part of a Bestiarum Imaginarium I am creating, and its beasts are influencers, gastro-foodies, and all those people that gravitate around food and gastronomy.

Except chefs and kitchen staff. Everyone writes about them, so I won’t do it. What interests me in this collection is the ones sitting around the table.

So let me start with the tale of a boy.

We will call the protagonist of our tale Gastro Boy.

As a Gastro Boy, you do not get to travel abroad a lot.

You mainly eat out invited. You have your own taste, sure, and you also eat out in all those establishments where you can afford to pay for a meal.

Your life is still better than others because you can still mingle with the affluents, the gourmands, the wine people, and all those interesting folks that surround gastronomy. But you lack gratitude towards the universe, and your tiny mouth is bitter about this cosmic injustice.

I imagine Gastro Boy to be an avid follower of Instagram users that are way luckier than us all (read: have more disposable income) and I imagine Gastro Boy spends his days looking eagerly at their pictures and stories, posted from the best restaurants in the world.

Especially this one restaurant, as a Gastro Boy you have had your eyes on it since a long time ago, as it became fashionable in your social circle to gather in groups and visit this establishment and its incredible cellar.

But you have never been invited to these convivial events, and in your heart you suffer bitterly, scrolling past their Instagram posts and stories.

One day, you tell yourself. One day you will also be one of them.

You see them: the Wealthy Boys, The Wine Boys, The Chef Boys, and especially your idol, the Gastronomist. He is not a boy like the others. He is god, to your eyes. And you’ve seen their every move, gathering, and solo expedition to this iconic place.

You dream on.

Inciting incident

Imagine then, that one day you pester one of these well-acquainted persons so so much, that they agree to ensure a good word with a restaurant that is so special to you, and that is nearly impossible to reserve.

You managed their personal blessing to help you secure a table.

Hooray!

They don’t want to share the table with you, sadly, nor mount one of those happy tables you have seen so many times, packed with nice ladies, chefs, wine people, journalists and so on.

But it doesn’t matter: they helped you secure your own table. It’s enough. Or…not?

You are on your own, but you do not care (too much).

Of course, when retelling this story, you will lie about how you came to have a table and you will claim to have gone through the regular website route, you naughty one.

But lies, as they say in my country, have very short legs - and Karma is...we know it.

You do not care.

Finally, you have your reservation! You round up some of your friends to go with you.

The place you are headed to is iconic in gastronomy, and you are so very excited you call several times in advance to make sure that your reservation is alright. You are already on the list of annoying customers at this moment, but you do not know, nor suspect it.

The story as it should have been told

Finally, you arrive at the place. And nothing is as you had dreamed.

You recount that on the morning of the fateful lunch you ate little, just coffee and fruit because you wanted it to be perfect.

No tarnished appetite for you!

You think it started with the right foot when, for a table of four in a place that sells DRC by the case, you have the audacity to lecture the Sommelier saying that you will only cash out way less than 50€ per person for a wine pairing because you wanted “three or four wines by the glass”.

The sommelier of this place, who is used to opening thousands of euro bottles doesn’t flinch and, true to the art of servicing, seems to go along with the idea, with no further questions - says Gastro Boy.

Oh, dear.

You, the reader, would have already seen what faux pas he had committed. He could have elegantly lashed out the 50 euro times as many people at the table for one, nice, elegant and honestly very drinkable bottle. But he wanted to do what social media told him to do in that place: have the infamous lineup of bottles to show off.

The infamous line-up is what got him.

The rest is a trainwreck from there.

The sommelier doesn’t know or care who Gastro Boy is and instead asks him if he knows someone else, in his same industry, apparently a good and frequent customer, described as someone way more influential. Ouch.

Gastro Boy gets prissy with this question.

He then starts finding errors and mistakes in every plate, even those that are quite impossible. He confounds a cheese that this establishment serves with another, completely different, and criticises this dish not understanding that it was the other cheese.

It’s like they served Roquefort and you wrote a critique of Gorgonzola.

Subtly similar, but not the same thing.

Then he complains about the special feature of the food cooked in this establishment - the main reason people flock to it.

Remember the wine?

Well, having exhausted the budget for wine, the sommelier leaves a bottle on their table.

Out of pity and misery perhaps, he lets Gastro Boy and his party alone, apparently abandoning a bottle of budget-appropriate wine on his table. But Gastro Boy is not happy and says that this is not good behaviour, as he and his miserable budget should have been treated to a plethora of good wines instead.

You can almost HEAR him stomping his feet.

In this, Gastro Boy is completely oblivious to the fact that he has just been gifted a bottle, albeit a cheap one, but with eyes closed so that he and his group of ragamuffins could end their meal decently.

But no, he wanted to have more glasses from different bottles.

Forgetting his meagre initial budget.

He tells that, weeks before, he was told by an affluent customer, a regular to this establishment, that the Sommelier gave their table a taste of several bottles from the best wine regions, without billing them. Gastro Boy is sour with resentment - without thinking that maybe the total wine bill for that table amounted to several thousand euros on that trip alone - of course, a sip or another of some other bottle, in this case, is granted.

He also forgets that probably the affluent party is almost a regular, and over the years has probably financed this establishment quite a lot.

Not the same thing as Gastro Boy’s meagre head tab on a first and (likely) last visit, though.

But he doesn’t grasp this context.

He has seen the Instagram pictures and posts of all those people.

He complains about his crushed expectation, smashed by his tiny budget and possibly by his entitled and annoying attitude. He complains about the service, even saying as an excuse that he was not expecting the level of a three Michelin star.

So he writes a sour, bitter, sad review of a restaurant that tells more about him than about the establishment.

Epilogue

The review gets published, and thus, public. What was the impact of it, as we paraphrased today?

The gastronomic community was well divided into those who cringe (literally) and those who laugh (also literally).

Poor Gastro Boy.

This time was not able to swim with fishes bigger than him, and yet falling through the fine sieve of the fabric of this gastronomic reality.