“Never order from Mr. Szechuan on Tuesdays,” said Lauren. “That’s the regular chef’s night off.”
“It’s called Mr. Szechuan? Really?” said Lindsay.
“What? It’s really good! Best Chinese food on Whitman Street. Except on Tuesdays.”
“I got food poisoning from that sushi place on Flatbush, near where Evan lives,” said Lindsay, playing along. “So that was not great.”
“Ooh, yeah,” said Evan. “I walked by that place recently. The health department gave them a C.”
“I didn’t know restaurants could get Cs. I’ve only ever seen As and Bs,” said Lauren. “The café has an A, by the way.”
“Oh, the sushi place deserved that C,” said Lindsay. “I couldn’t eat sushi for like three months after that. And it’s a shame because I love sushi, and that place is convenient.”
“All this talk of bad meals is kind of making this meal even worse,” said Lauren.
Everyone sampled from everyone else’s dishes and agreed the food was bland, the okra was slimy, the corn muffins were too sweet, and the “maple butter sauce” that came with Evan’s chicken and waffles seemed like butter melted into pancake syrup—the cheap kind from the grocery store, not real maple syrup.
Lindsay didn’t want the restaurant staff to know she was a critic, so she tapped out notes on her phone as discreetly as possible. The review would be scathing, but this place deserved it.
She didn’t relish giving negative reviews. She loved eating a great meal and finding ways to celebrate it in her writing. She loved coming up with the perfect words to describe how something tasted, so her readers could taste it along with her. She wanted to lure customers to these restaurants, because she wanted good restaurants to stay open. But this was not good. Everything here saidamateurto Lindsay.
“This space is cursed, for sure,” Lauren said as she looked at the dessert menu. “Why is everything so extra? Is the devilish surprise in the devil’s food cake something spicy?”
“Based on dinner,” said Evan, “probably not.”
Chapter 3
Lindsay woke up the day after her review of Pepper went live to a phone full of notifications.
It took her a minute to figure out what was happening, but it seemed that the review was starting to go viral.
She couldn’t immediately figure out why. She’d written negative restaurant reviews before. She’d written jokey reviews of high-profile restaurants. Her takedown of a popular steak house in Williamsburg was a perennial favorite, for example, but it hadn’t gotten much traction outside of foodie communities. Just a year ago, a celebrity chef had opened a new restaurant in Park Slope that Lindsay had panned because everything she’d ordered had been dry and overcooked. That restaurant had since closed because Lindsay had been correct, but if more than a hundred people read that review, Lindsay would have died of shock.
Maybe it was just who happened to log into the internet on any given day. Still, somehow, Lindsay’s article was getting a ton of buzz on social media.
Joey Maguire has put his name on a remarkable restaurant in Brooklyn, Lindsay had written.It is remarkable mostly because the restaurant is called Pepper, and yet it serves food that contains none. There didn’t seem to be much salt, either. This is Cooking 101, is it not? Or maybe it’s some kind of hipster irony to go with the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood around it. Because it certainly wasn’t good food.
She’d then spent the next eight hundred words tearing into the restaurant for being bland and uninspired and kind of silly.
And people were eating it up.
A thrill went through Lindsay. Criticizing steak houses many considered New York institutions was one thing. Lindsay wrote for an online magazine that didn’t have much of an audience outside of the New York metropolitan area. Making fun of a restaurant owned by a celebrity with a huge fan base apparently had a more national appeal.
She showered and got dressed, and when she looked at her phone again, it was still blowing up. Not all of it was positive. Joey Maguire fans were starting to come after her. Maguire himself had been out of the public eye for a little bit as his solo career floundered, but fifteen years ago, he and the Bayside Boys had been everywhere, their songs in constant rotation on radios, and he still had passionate fans. A lot of the negative comments were angry, misspelled nonsense, but a few people told her to go to hell or worse. Lindsay wasn’t very bothered by the comments, even the ugly ones, because the vast majority of the buzz was positive, congratulating her for landing so many punches against a restaurant that a lot of other critics had agreed was not great.
Then her boss called.
For the first time, Lindsay worried suddenly that she might be in trouble. What the public thought was one thing, but what the corporate owners ofEat Out New Yorkthought was something else. The review had gone through two editors before it was posted and no one objected, but if Joey Maguire or someone else associated with the restaurant had called to complain to the higher-ups, Lindsay’s job could be in jeopardy. She’d never held herself back in her writing, but maybe she should have here. There was no shortage of food writers in New York willing to be more politic who would happily take Lindsay’s job. She answered her phone reluctantly, but started cooking up a defense as she did.
“The good news,” said Dawn, the editor in chief ofEat Out New York, “is that Joey Maguire called me himself and has a good sense of humor about it. He said that their reservations are through the roof, although I think that’s probably because people want to see this mess for themselves. In the meantime, he wanted to issue an official comment that he’s making some changes at the restaurant.”
“That’s wild.”
“You probably did him a favor.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I worried for a second that you were calling to fire me.”
“Nope. This was great for both you and the website. Page views are hitting some kind of new record. Congratulations, Lindsay. You’ve gone viral.”
