The restaurant in question: Bros in Lecce
(Picture: Google Streetview)A Michelin star is considered to be the ultimate hallmark of fine dining, an honor awarded to the world’s top chefs and restaurants.
It’s meant to signify culinary excellence, and the stars are not easy to obtain.
All that is to say: if you go to a Michelin star restaurant you expect it to be pretty darn good, or the very least—edible, right?
For author Geraldine DeRuiter, this was apparently not the case.
DeRuiter shared her horrible dining experience at Bros. in Lecce, Italy where she was served meat droplets a tablespoon of crab and glasses of vinegar... yum?
“There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it’s so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement,” she began her scathing yet comical review in The Everywhereist blog, adding: “The sort of meal where everyone involved was definitely trying to do something; it’s just not entirely clear what.”
Further prefacing her review, she added: “It’s as though someone had read about food and restaurants, but had never experienced either, and this was their attempt to recreate it.”
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Comparing the ordeal to a “Dickensian novel” she said that nothing she and her party were served at Bros. was nowhere “even close to an actual meal served.”
Some of the laughable portions, which DeRuiter said were passed off as “courses” included slivers of edible paper and shots of vinegar. Worryingly, she added that “everything tasted like fish, even the non-fish courses.”
Moreover, not one hot dish was served, and every meal came cold, she said.
The customer claimed she was all the more shocked as she had checked TripAdvisor prior to her visit. “Other people who’ve eaten at Bros were served food. Some of them got meat, and ravioli, and more than one slice of bread. Some of them were served things that needed to be eaten with forks and spoons,” she said of the online reviews she saw.
To top it all off, DeRuiter alleged that one member of her party “was served nothing for three consecutive courses” because the chef “couldn’t figure out how to accommodate her food allergies” while another member actually was served food he was allergic to, claiming the restaurant “didn’t care enough to accommodate his.”
“Maybe we should have known that a restaurant named “Bros” was going to be a disaster,” she joked at the end of her review.
Her final verdict? “Do not eat here. I cannot express this enough,” she concluded.
We reached out to the restaurant for comment but have yet to hear back.
