Zero Stars

One day, we were in Slidell (at that great Heritage Park with the splash pad) and the boys were hungry, so we tried La. Pines Cafe, right under the water tower.  One of the things about this place was that it was featured on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.  Inside, it even has some sort of stencil on the wall, signed by Guy Fieri:
LA Pines Cafe, Slidell LA
We shared a roast beef poboy, and a shrimp poboy.  Not exceptional, but they were both okay.

Timing: everyone is going on and on about the review that just came out yesterday at the NYT on Guy’s NYC restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar in Times Square which Pete Wells rated: **zero stars**.

Apparently because the restaurant and its food hit such a raw nerve with Pete, he wrote it in a style of all questions, as in:
When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?

and
What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?

and
Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?

and
How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable? Why augment tortilla chips with fried lasagna noodles that taste like nothing except oil? Why not bury those chips under a properly hot and filling layer of melted cheese and jalapeños instead of dribbling them with thin needles of pepperoni and cold gray clots of ground turkey?

and
When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?


Here’s a website listing all the places that have been on the DDD show.

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