Amusing Moments in the Life of a Food Critic

Saw this lady next to us go nuclear at an Italian restaurant central Texas one night. She had asked her date to order for her and he had asked for the risotto with black squid ink.

When she returned from making a phone call, there was the blank ink interspersed with the risotto. She had a cow, thinking their waiter had poured ink from a fountain pen into her dish. Note: at no point did we attempt to administer a basic food intelligence test to this lady. Her date tried to explain how the black ink was used in cooking but she wasn’t buying it.

The black ink generated by certain types of squid is considered to be a defense mechanism. The Italians consider it to be il supremo for taste enhancement.

Wonder how that couple made out the rest of the evening?

…

I have a bias for the correct pronunciation of foods and wines. So I was doubly amused when I gently corrected a server one night when he replied that they did indeed have “brus-chetta”. I told him that it was pronounced “brus-ketta”.

No sooner had I spoken than an extremely agitated woman at the next table almost yelled at me. “It’s brus-chetta,” she said with no small amount of annoyance. “I just got back from Italy.”

I tried to keep a straight face. “Thanks for your input ma’am. But how would you pronounce C-h-i-a-n-t-i?” I spelled it for her letter by letter.

“Well, key-ahn-tee of course” she blustered.

“Exactly,” I said. “You see, in Italian the ‘ch’ takes the sound of a ‘k’”.

Her frown grew more severe. “I don’t see your point!”

I realized there was no point in going further. “’Ch’ takes a ‘k’. It’s that simple.”

“But on one hand you are referring to food: and on the other hand to wine.” She made a gesture that seemed like it could be obscene.

Even the waiter had been won over at this point. He looked at the lady and said: “I think Mr. Balon is correct.”

“The hell he is,” she trumpeted, “I’ve been to Italy!”

I left the restaurant chuckling to myself and wondering what part of Italy she had been to.

…

Lots of people these days consider themselves to be wine experts. Such was the case a few weeks ago with the gentleman who had ordered a bottle of Caymus Special Selection ’03 at a local Austin restaurant. As the waiter opened the bottle and removed the cork, a small amount of cork broke off and fell into the wine bottle. As the wine was poured, a few minute pieces of the cork slipped into the wine expert’s glass.

“This wine is corked,” he shouted to the sommelier. “Definitely corked!”

Wine experts knows that when a wine is corked, it’s the result of a bacterium that contaminates the cork during the aging process of the wine. The smell of a corked wine is unmistakable: like a wet basement after a flood or like a moldy piece of cardboard buried in leaves and soil. Experts also know enough to not overreact when a careless waiter pushes the corkscrew all the way through the cork and a few bits of cork are left to be poured out.

The sommelier smelled and then tasted the wine. He knew there was nothing wrong with it. But the expert persisted. The wine, by the way, cost upwards of $300. The sommelier held his ground. He assured the customer that the wine was fine. He was not about to eat the cost.

Then the expert spied me at an adjacent table. “There’s Rob Balon, the food critic. Let him taste it.” I was apparently being called on to be the arbiter or ultimate judge.

The sommelier glanced over at me and shrugged his shoulders in sort of a non-verbal apology. He approached our table and offered me one of the offending glasses. The expert looked over as well, confident that he would be vindicated. By now the entire restaurant was watching. I took the glass, gave it a swirl, and then gave it a sniff. I caught no moldy odor whatsoever. A tasting confirmed it. No astringencies, nothing like that horrible paint-thinner taste one sometimes gets with a corked wine.

“It’s perfect,” I said. I looked over to the expert’s table and shrugged my shoulders. “Totally drinkable.”

The expert slumped in his chair. “Fine, pour the damn wine. What do I know anyway?” Then he looked over at me. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I go to your website again!” he said with some rancor.

“And it’ll be a cold day in hell before you are ever invited to join our Gonzo Gourmet Club,” I replied.

The sommelier smiled as he passed my table and gave a brief bow before he went back into the wine cellar. The evening passed without further event.