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It is always nice to read about wonderfully memorable meals, but let’s not forget the meals that were memorable for the very worst reasons.
Actor and keen cook Stanley Tucci mentions one of those meals in his new memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food, and it would send a shiver down the toughest spine. Look away now if you have a delicate disposition or are embarking on a meal.
The actor was in France, promoting Julie & Julia with his screen wife Meryl Streep who played the acclaimed cook Julia Child. It’s ironic that they played two great gourmands because they made a rookie tourist error and ordered the andouillette.
It’s fair to say that andouillette is an acquired taste. It is a sausage packed with the intestines of a pig, and when it is cut open, bundles of entrails fall out and give off a strong smell that some people would describe as sewage-like.
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Tucci recalled how Streep gamely cut off a small piece and chewed it gingerly before declaring it had “a bit of the barnyard” about it.
Not even their combined acting skills could disguise their disgust. The waiter quickly removed the pungent plates and they ordered omelettes instead.
Singer Róisín Murphy was similarly felled by the strong sausage in France. The waiter double-checked if she wanted that particular dish when she ordered it, but she assured him she could eat anything. After her face turned several shades of green, the waiter returned and removed her plate. He gave her another dish for free on the basis that he hadn’t laughed so much in years.
In both cases, the fault lay with the customers, but the restaurants were very forgiving of their diners’ failure to appreciate a French delicacy.
Donald Trump was not as forgiving when a Vanity Fair review criticised Trump Grill in New York’s Trump Tower in 2016. Tina Nguyen wrote that she once ate an eyeball popped from the skull of a roasted pig, for a dare, and it was nicer than the burger she had at Trump Grill. It was “a sad little meat thing…hiding its shame under a slice of melted orange cheese”, she wrote.
She likened the guacamole to something astronauts would have eaten from a tube in the early days of space travel and dismissed the cocktails as something concocted by a college student in their dormitory.
After eating the “rich-man slop”, she brushed her teeth twice and curled up in bed until the nausea passed. I suspect she enjoyed writing the review far more than she enjoyed eating the food.
Did Trump thank her graciously for the criticism and vow to take it all on board? Well, no. The former US president had not been banned from Twitter at that stage so he took to his favourite social media platform to blast Vanity Fair’s readership figures and predict the editor would be sacked.
Vanity Fair was also responsible for one of the most excoriating reviews penned by the late AA Gill. After eating at 66 in New York, he described the shrimp-and-foie-dumplings as “fishy liver-filled condoms…properly vile, with a savour that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital”.
Nor did he hold back when he reviewed Theo Randall’s restaurant in London. He said his dish looked as though all the ingredients had been fed through an office shredder with half a pint of water and then placed under a hot lamp for hours.
Condoms were also called to mind when Jay Rayner reviewed Le Cinq, a Michelin three-star restaurant in Paris, for the Guardian in 2017. While he thought his canape looked like a Barbie-sized silicone breast implant, his companion said it was like eating a condom that had been left lying about in a dusty greengrocer’s.
He speculated that his main course of pigeon was served so pink it might be encouraged to fly again if given a few volts.
That review almost caused an international incident with French media and social media leaping to the defence of the revered institution. As you would expect, the restaurant remained aloof from the drama in the finest French fashion.
And what would Rayner say if faced with a plate of andouillette? It seems he has a stronger stomach than Streep, Tucci and Murphy combined. He accepts that they are stinky but loves them.
“Eating an andouillette is an experience that pounds the senses,” he once wrote.
If you would prefer your senses to remain unpounded, you’d better just take his word for it.