Happy Halloween! I haven’t posted much fiction on here, but I’m thinking of doing more in the coming months. To test the waters, this is a short story which appears in my new collection Something’s Gotta Kill You. By clicking the audio player above, you can also hear the brand new recorded version, which for now is exclusive to this site (though I hope to do an audiobook of the whole collection soon). If you enjoy it, 17 other short stories appear in the new book.
Without any further adieu, here is…
Everyone’s a Critic
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two restaurant reviews since my last confession.
I ache. Every night, I drive home specked with tiny burns from droplets of grease, legs sore from standing, spirit worn from smiling. Every night I need a glass of whiskey to help me sit at the computer and check Yelp for new reviews.
These people, Father. You can’t please them.
My parents and teachers prepared me for a world where you succeed to the level you’re willing to work, but the world we have now isn’t the one they grew up in; it isn’t the one they promised. When I built Pasta Pronto, I told myself the harder I worked at perfecting my ingredients and my atmosphere, the higher the business would rise, but it’s not that simple anymore.
We have the Internet now.
It used to be the jobs picked the people and it took skill to get started. You had to study, to pass tests, to be apprenticed by a master before you could work a trade. But the new generation, they just decide. They say, “I’m a novelist now,” or “I’m a graphic designer,” or “I’m a food critic,” and then they just are, without having to learn a thing in order to get there.
The novelist self-publishes a sixty-page diaper rash with more typos than commas. The graphic designer opens an online t-shirt shop built entirely on infringed copyrights. And the critic… the critic says that my fettuccini with shrimp doesn’t have enough shrimp.
He actually says that. And nobody cross-checks him either. Nobody holds his feet to the fire about the correct shrimp-to-pasta ratio and how he’d know better than I—I who spent four years in culinary school scribbling through notebooks to make sure I took in everything. All that time spent working up to my profession. I didn’t just give myself permission to start wherever I wanted the way these young people think they’re entitled to.
No. He says not enough shrimp, and that’s the end of it. Yelp lets him say it, and now it’s there in print, forever. My fettuccini is short on shrimp. Case closed.
I’m sorry, Father, I’m getting sidetracked. I just want to fill you in so you understand. My usual church is on the other side of town, but this couldn’t wait. I needed to get this out tonight.
Father…
I am… bad… at taking criticism.
I noticed I had this in me a few years ago, before I bought Pasta Pronto. I was still studying the culinary arts at the time and I was at home every night, reading, cooking, going over notes. I got exhausted one night and needed a break, so I went to a movie. I saw Chef. Did you see that one, Father? My classmates and professors had been raving all week. They were right. It was the first time I’d seen passion for food translated effectively into fiction.
I went home, wanting to share the experience and the love with the world, and I looked at the movie’s Facebook page. There were reviews there, and I made the mistake of reading them.
It would be one thing if these were professional movie critics who knew about subtext and shot composition and all those other things I don’t know about, but these were just normal people. They used empty words like “boring” and “stupid” and complained that they didn’t want to watch an overweight person on screen for a whole movie.
When I came across one of the angriest, most hateful, vitriolic reviews I’d ever seen for anything, I clicked on the profile of the person who’d posted it. There I was on his Facebook page. A page full of sarcasm and flippancy, the dismissive rantings of a sociopath who contributed nothing and sought to demoralize those who did. There was no profile picture, but there was a name and a city. And it was my city.
I tried to find an address. I didn’t have a phone book, but I had the Internet, and after an hour of Googling I’d found two sets of phone numbers and addresses that matched his last name. I called the first one and asked the woman who answered if Robert was home. She shouted for him.
A moment later, it was a little boy’s voice that answered. A child maybe twelve years old.
I hung up.
I stood there shaking. I’d wanted to confront him about the review, to ask what gave him the right to tear apart another person’s labors like he did. Maybe I would have said something, but I knew his mother was next to him, and I had no idea, back then, whether such a call could be easily traced.
Still, I had a name, and now I had a phone number, which meant I also had an address.
The next morning I cut letters out of magazines and glued them to a sheet of paper the way I’d seen in movies. I left the letter in his mailbox in an envelope with his name on it. It said, “Delete your review for Chef or I will come to your house and kill you.”
I cannot tell you the rush I felt.
Of course I wouldn’t have done it, Father. But it thrilled me to imagine an anonymous destructor feeling his own tactics turned on him.
If I’d been more introspective in those days, I suppose I could have known the danger of someone with my affliction owning a restaurant, working in a world where slanderous reviews come so freely and easily, but I was years into my schooling and deep in debt. And anyway, what job can you work in today’s world that’s free from criticism? This very church has a three-point-eight on Yelp, Father. A Church! Somebody gave you a two-star rating last month because she couldn’t hear the sermon well enough from the back. She chose to sit in the back and then ridiculed your church because the laws of sound weren’t to her liking. How do these people live with themselves?
Well, I don’t know if that boy’s parents saw the letter, or if they notified the police, or if there was an investigation. All I know is that nobody ever came to me, and when I looked at the Facebook page the next day, the review was gone.
I know I’m taking up your time, Father, but it’s late and no one else is waiting. I hope you don’t mind. It’s just that I want you to have this in context. I’ve had my own restaurant for a year now and it’s a battle to persuade contented people to remember to post reviews. Malicious people, meanwhile, are champing at the bit.
Do you know they use bad reviews as a threat to get discounts? It happens every day. They say thinly-veiled things like, “We just want you to know we were unsatisfied. We’d seen a lot of great reviews for this place, and it seems like it’s not deserving of such a high rating on Facebook.” Then once they’re sure you’re on the same page, when you ask what you could do to make their experience more pleasant, they say, “I don’t know. Maybe if we got a free dessert or something…”
What can you do? You can’t say, “Get the fuck out of my restaurant, you scheming piece of shit.” You’d just be giving them fuel!
Sorry. I’m sorry, Father. I’m getting riled up. Forgive me. I think I’ve established my control over my emotions isn’t what it could be. But can you blame me?
Two weeks ago, this family is placing an order and a little girl wants to try the chocolate cake and her mom says, “I don’t know, honey. Apparently it’s pretty dry here.”
Can you believe that? Dry? My chocolate cake? I’ve seen you at the restaurant, Father. You’ve had my chocolate cake. Is it dry? Could anybody in their right mind describe my chocolate cake as dry? You get a slice every time you come in. Would you do that if it was dry?
It’s the least dry chocolate cake in the city. It’s too moist, if anything.
Well, no. It’s not too moist either. It’s perfect. And damn to hell anyone who says differently.
But here’s this woman making this claim and I can’t understand why. Then I realize her phone is open to Yelp and I have to take a deep breath and make myself check. And there it is. Somebody that morning has given me one star—one star!—because the cake is dry. My cake. Dry.
I checked the cameras. I looked at everyone who ate chocolate cake for the last three days, trying to spot even one face that looked like the face of a person eating dry cake, but it wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t there. How could it be there if the cake was never dry in the first place?
I might never have found that man if he hadn’t made himself obvious in just one way. When I looked at his review history, he had given one-star ratings to every Italian restaurant in a ten-mile radius.
Every Italian restaurant except one.
Don’t get so antsy, Father. I’m getting to the point.
Let me ask you this: do you ever read about serial killers? They say what usually happens is a gradual escalation. Harming animals as a child is an early sign. For years, maybe they stalk, or threaten. They subsist on the fantasy without ever quite following through. But the fantasy only takes them so far. Eventually they cross a line, and once they cross it, almost none of them can ever go back.
I guess that’s how a lot of things are.
This guy, Ralph, who had a restaurant in my area, maybe that’s how he felt the first time he posted a negative review for a competitor. Maybe each time he saw somebody go into Pasta Pronto, or Rigatoni House, or even the goddamn Olive Garden, maybe he had to find somewhere private to pleasure himself to the fantasy of posting a bad review. Maybe he’d write up those blistering takedowns, complete with one-star ratings, coming as close to posting them as he could, just to feel that rush. Then one day, something pushed him over the edge and he just… did it.
Then once he’d done it, he had to do it again. Over and over. More and more. Rude waiters, dirty restrooms, dry cake. He pulled out all the stops. Every day, a new bad rating, dragging down all his peers, giving every one of us a shoddy reputation, trying to make his own restaurant stand out amidst the sludge.
I know how he felt. When I went into his restaurant that day and sat a table, when I looked him in the eye after I ordered his chocolate cake, a moment passed between us where he knew I knew. The last two years, all the times I’d tracked critics to their houses, left them letters, thought about the revenge I could exact if I chose… Well, looking into Ralph’s eyes, I knew the fantasy wasn’t enough anymore. This was the time to finally just… do it.
When he asked me how everything was, I said, “That was some chocolate cake, Ralph. I don’t know how you do it. Mine always comes out dry.”
Here’s the thing, Father. Most of these critics, I don’t understand. They have lives outside of food. They’re teachers and firefighters and politicians and veterinarians. Shattering the dreams that we business owners have built is just a hobby for them, an afterthought. It’s not even their livelihood.
Ralph, him I understood. I didn’t respect him, but I understood him. Maybe that was why I hated him that much more.
When I went into his house that weekend and waited for him to come home, I sat thinking about how we were the same breed. There is another turn of events where we might have been friends. If we’d met in culinary school, we might have opened a restaurant together as partners, instead of as rivals. Instead, here we were. Our similar but opposing natures getting the better of us.
It wasn’t hard to do, like I thought it might be. I didn’t have second thoughts or find myself gagging. It felt right.
A chef’s knife is a part of his body. A part of his soul, even. It guided me through it all. I built my business with that knife, and now I was protecting it. I hadn’t butchered a hog since my teens, but some things never leave you.
I don’t know that I have an interest in cannibalism. I didn’t cook him, and I certainly didn’t eat him. But the way I took him apart, I could have, and I left him in his freezer in case anyone else should want to.
It’s like I said. For a while you fantasize, then eventually you just do it. But it’s important to always have a place to build to. So maybe I’ll cook the next one. Maybe I’ll try a bite. For now it’s just a fantasy, but we’ll see if the fantasy is enough. If you’ll pardon a pun, I’m not taking anything off the table.
Whew. It feels good to have that off my chest. I’ve been carrying that burden for over a week now.
I got on his phone after it was done and deleted all his reviews. Not just for Pasta Pronto, but for all of us. It might have given me an edge to keep the others up, but it felt wrong. There are some sicknesses that go beyond even me.
Is that part a sin, Father? Deleting a dead man’s fraudulent reviews? Or is that something Jesus might have done? The world has gotten so complicated in the age of the Internet, it’s hard to tell sometimes.
One way or another, there is one more thing. One more thing I definitely need to confess.
As I said, it has been two reviews since my last confession. The chocolate cake was the first, and the fettuccini with shrimp was the second. Too little shrimp, said that cowardly anonymous reviewer.
You tried my fettuccini with shrimp, didn’t you, Father? I saw you at the restaurant last night. What did you think of your meal? Was there enough shrimp? Or did I go cheap on you?
Sit the fuck down, Father.
You know what you did.
Just tell me how many Hail Marys this will cost me.
Thanks for reading. Check out Something’s Gotta Kill You, available from Amazon in paperback of digital, for seventeen other short stories, along with this one.