Food Adventures

Worst Restaurants in the World.

Voisin, Paris, 1870
The most extraordinary restaurant menus of all time must be those found in Paris during the siege of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It was an extravagant, decadent, licentious era in Parisian history in any case, and restaurants were at the peak of fashion, specifically one called Restaurant Voisin. The siege of the city by Bismark’s troops came as no surprise and the city thought it was well-prepared, in culinary terms at least, with 250,000 sheep and 40,000 oxen crammed into every available bit of land. However, a few simple errors in planning meant that food began to run out earlier than anticipated. The citizens turned at first to horsemeat, encouraged by the city’s leaders, and developed a taste for it that remains to this day.

By the end of 1870, however, the residents had moved onto rats, cats and dogs (cats only fetched 6 francs per pound, whilst a rabbit was forty francs, and a rat was a mere half a franc). But with dwindling resources, hungry eyes eventually turned to the animals in the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes. It was only a matter of time before elephant soup, antelope and cats flanked by rats were apparently on the menu of Voisin, alongside Le civet de kangourou (kangaroo), Le chameau roti a l’anglais (camel) and Cuissot de Lopu, sauce chevreuil (wolf with venison sauce). The food was presumably eaten out of desperation, so it’s hard to tell whether it was a glorious experience or a desperate one.

The Worst Meal I Ever Ate
One Christmas I went with my wife and four friends to a restaurant called Les Trois Garcons near Brick Lane in London. I had the most dreadful meal of my life, with spectacularly awful food, appallingly bad service and all at a stellar price. It thrills me to tell you about it.

I could bend your ear for many happy hours with the detail, but it’s all summed up by one moment: after being presented with a plate of nasty, cheap, unripe, yet gloriously expensive cheese I asked what cheeses they were. After a while, a man in chef’s whites appeared at my table, wearing the demeanour of a school bully due to be told off by a weak-willed teacher. He pointed at a piece of unripe Somerset brie and told me it was a goat’s cheese. Where from? I enquired. Paris, he said. Bemused, I asked what sort of goat’s cheese it was. He sighed an impatient sigh and said ‘a small white fluffy one’ before turning on his heels and swaggering off downstairs.

 

If you’ve had any strange and wonderful food adventures that you’d like to share, please send them to research@thegastroanut.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ó Stefan Gates 2005