American Psycho, Fine Dining, and Scams
I sometimes take my work to my town’s local coffee shop, something I probably should stop doing as it is half a block away from a fantastic independent bookstore. So last week I wandered inside the bookstore (yet again) sternly lecturing myself not to buy another book (yet again) and found myself staring at the prominently displayed new fiction bookshelf and taking The Shards, the newest novel by Bret Easton Ellis, off the shelf. And then I did something I normally do not at independent bookstores: I put it back on the shelf and walked out empty-handed. I’ve heard the buzz about The Shards. The plot sounds intriguing! But I cannot do it, at least not right now, because I just finished reading - for the first and last time - American Psycho. I’ve had my fill of Bret Easton Ellis for a while; time to read someone much tamer, like, oh, Stephen King.
I knew to expect violence, gore, and serial killing aplenty when I cracked open the first pages of American Psycho. I can’t say I was emotionally prepared for the depth of the novel’s depravity, but I wasn’t surprised, per se. What I had no idea to expect was Ellis’ skewering and evisceration of 1980s Manhattan fine dining. I knew the book was meant as satire, and nowhere was this more apparent than what I’ll call The Restaurant Scenes. Dear reader, there are many. And they contain utterly bizarre and revolting food descriptions such as
“Gravlax pot pie with tomatillo sauce”
“Sashimi with goat cheese”
“Scallop sausage and grilled salmon with raspberry vinegar and guacamole”
“Shad-roe ravioli with apple compote”
“Monkfish ragout with violets”
“Quail stuffed in blue corn tortillas garnished with oysters in potato skins”
“Swordfish meat loaf with kiwi mustard”
“Blackened lobster with strawberry sauce”
I always get stuck on gravlax pot pie. How does that even work? The definition of gravlax is salmon cured with sugar and salt; additional flavors are typically added, lemon, dill, but there’s room for some creativity. The definition of pot pie is a filling, typically chicken in a cream sauce with some vegetables, but again, there’s room for creativity , baked beneath or between pie crust. The entire concept of a gravlax pot pie is a culinary - and mental - conundrum. If gravlax is placed under a pie crust and subjected to heat, then it is, by definition, no longer gravlax. So is the gravlax sitting atop cooked pastry dough? But if the pastry is sitting under, rather than baked atop, other ingredients, then it is, by definition, not pot pie. I suppose you could squint your eyes hard enough at some deconstruction fad to make it work, but Ellis doesn’t mention that it was deconstructed at all. And that trend was still years away. I digress.
I was struck by how long, from the book's publication date in 1991, it took to even slightly shift our culture’s perception of and obsession with fine dining. Probably no one who read it upon publication did, but I think if you absorbed American Psycho back in 1991, you could have almost predicted The Shed at Dulwich in 2017.
The Shed Scam
Sometime in the mid-2010s, London resident Oobah Butler found paid work writing fake restaurant reviews for TripAdvisor. He would write these fake reviews, swooning over meals he had never eaten, and watch these restaurants’ TripAdvisor rankings steadily rise. The job made him ponder how easily people believe things with so much as a veneer of authenticity even when it was all bullshit. Well, mostly bullshit. The meals were fake, but these restaurants were real. But: what if one wasn’t? Sure, he’d established that you could easily fake a restaurant experience online… but could you fake an actual restaurant? Butler decided to find out.
He took his small London backyard as inspiration: a tiny yard featuring one picnic table and chairs plus a small shed. One burner phone later, and The Shed at Dulwich was born. He made a logo and website, then successfully registered this fake restaurant on TripAdvisor. To avoid disclosing his home address (TripAdvisor requires all venues to provide a physical address) Butler gave the name of the street and declared the eatery a “reservations by phone only” establishment. He provided the burner phone’s number.
The Shed at Dulwich’s quirky concept was food based on moods, and it “offered” such menu items as:
“Rabbit kidneys on toast seasoned with saffron and an oyster bisque. Served with a side of pomegranate souffle” (representing “Lust”)
“Yorkshire blue macaroni and cheese seasoned with bacon shavings and served in a 600TC Egyptian cotton bowl. Comes with a side of sourdough bread” (representing “Comfort”)
As Butler explained it: “Hot spots are all about quirks, so to cut through the noise I need a concept silly enough to infuriate your dad. A concept like naming all of our dishes after moods.”
But, Butler knew his restaurant website could not look legitimate without food pictures, and he was no cook himself. He got creative. Brunch consisted of a fried egg garnished with curly parsley, but the egg is whimsically propped on its side like the restaurant is channeling its inner Wylie Dufresne… except Butler’s FOOT is propping up the egg and obscured by clever camera angles. For one dessert picture, he took a Bleach power sponge, painted it dark brown, drizzled chocolate syrup atop, and artfully squirted “quenelles” of shaving cream alongside. It reminded me of the nauseating urinal cake scene in American Psycho (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky and please, DON’T ASK).
Butler enlisted friends and acquaintances to write fake reviews for The Shed, and watched its TripAdvisor ranking begin to climb. Pretty soon his burner phone started ringing. At first it was just people wanting reservations; of course Butler would always claim they were booked months in advance. This only added to the air of exclusivity, and made people more and more desperate to not miss out. Pretty soon, Butler’s burner phone was ringing off the hook! He found himself fielding calls from people applying for jobs, PR companies offering representation, and suppliers begging him to stock their products - all for a restaurant that literally did not exist.
The nonexistent restaurant continued to climb the online rankings until Butler’s original goal was realized: The Shed at Dulwich was ranked #1 on TripAdvisor. A restaurant literally not one single person had ever dined at was ranked the hottest restaurant in London on a popular and influential ratings website. Incredible.
TripAdvisor finally figured out the ruse, and The Shed’s entry was taken down. But it was too late. The burner phone kept ringing, and Butler decided to experiment with opening his “restaurant” for one night. He cleaned up his yard and set up a few extra tables. He enlisted a few friends to help him - one to DJ, one to waitress, one to help behind the scenes, and a few to pretend to be diners having an amazing time.
The Restaurant Opens, or Something
Butler still didn’t cook, so as part of his experiment he decided to present his diners with ready-to-eat meals. Frozen macaroni and cheese, canned soups, etc, all served on ceramic dishes and jazzed up with fresh herbs. He still faced two conundrums though: first, this was his home and he obviously didn’t want strangers discovering that; and second, there’s no way to realistically fake a fine dining restaurant experience without serving wine, and Butler didn’t have enough wine glasses. To solve his first problem, he greeted diners down the street and told them part of his restaurant experience included being escorted to their table blindfolded. The first couple was skeptical, but they relented when they saw Butler’s actor friends enthusiastically acquiescing. To account for his lack of wine glasses - and this may be my favorite part of the whole scam - Butler served wine in coffee mugs, and passed it off as whimsical and somehow sophisticated and possibly the next hottest fine dining trend?
By this point it was obvious that you could list a fake restaurant on a trusted site like TripAdvisor and create exclusivity and desire. But what about the actual food and experience? With the right presentation, could you fool people into thinking microwaved pasta was sophisticated fine dining fare? Butler wondered, “if enough people around you [are] saying, ‘This is delicious,’ will you go, ‘Yeah, it’s delicious, I guess - maybe?’”
Yes, Apparently
The answer appeared to be yes. The real diners were influenced by the friend actors “enjoying” their food, and decided that the restaurant was both real and had served them high-end delicious food. They gushed about the wonderful experience to their “waitress.”
This insane story strongly suggests that our collective relationship with fine dining in 2017 wasn’t terribly evolved from its satirical takedown in 1991.
Is “A deconstructed Aberdeen stew; all elements of the dish are served to the table as they would be in the process of cooking. Served with warm beef tea” (The Shed) so different from “We order something called eagle carpaccio, mesquite-grilled mahi-mahi, endive with chevre and chocolate-covered almonds, this weird kind of gazpacho with raw chicken in it, dry beer” (American Psycho)?
Ellis is merciless in his evisceration of the fine dining and fancy restaurant scene of 1980s Manhattan, but it's worth noting that the 80s occurred before our modern food culture. Food Network didn’t exist, Anthony Bourdain had yet to publish Kitchen Confidential, Instagram was not even a concept, and #MeToo was almost twenty years away. Fine dining is depicted in American Psycho as something yuppies needlessly cared about, and cared about because they were yuppies; it was a status symbol and social reinforcement mechanism and a game of one-upmanship for impossible-to-get restaurant reservations. These Wall Street bros pay outrageous sums of money for disgusting food combinations on tiny plates while stepping over and mocking (and in Patrick Bateman’s case, torturing and murdering) unhoused people going hungry in the richest nation on earth.
Supposedly Reckoning
Ellis wrote and published this book before our current food culture moment, before we became saturated with cooking shows, cookbook signings, and Instagram. Yet you can see a prescient thread lurking in his narrative. I feel like Ellis could have almost predicted Oobah Butler and his Shed. Today our culture is supposedly reckoning with our love of fine dining, now that we know that many male chefs are often predatory, ill-tempered scumbags; that the fine dining model cannot exist without exploited unpaid labor; that structural racism and misogyny are the foundation and scaffolding of the whole enterprise.
And why does fine dining hold such a sacred place in cultural status anyway? The food is by definition more expensive, but is it better? No one would answer that question with an unqualified yes. We all know full well that some of our best and favorite restaurant meals were from casual establishments. And we all know damn well that we’ve had some really mediocre, if not outright shitty, meals that cost several hundred dollars for two adults. I have eaten some delicious food in fine dining establishments, but the most memorable meals there have been, well, recognizable as food? My most fondly-remembered fine dining meals have been pasta with meaty ragu, fish tacos, pad Thai, mussels and fries, or the spiciest ever lamb vindaloo (reader, I saw God). What can I say, I’ve just never been prone to ordering fish foams or whatever. I ate at WD-50 once before it closed. It was weird! Which was part of its charm and I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy myself… but I don’t remember a single thing we ate. What I mostly remember from that date night was arriving at the train station to commute home at the exact minute a massive Katy Perry concert ended, and sharing the train home to my outer borough with a gaggle of tween girls having spectacular meltdowns while their moms looked about helplessly. It was… a sight!
And yet. I cannot deny the attraction of fine dining. I think it’s much more the experience than the food. We’re tired, we’re ragged, we’re messy human animals trying to survive late-stage capitalism with too much dumb shit filling our schedules. And if you make the admittedly large assumption of at least occasional affordability, then having one night, just one fucking night, to look and feel pretty and act dignified in a room with ambiance that is scientifically designed to relax you and make you feel special is sometimes just too tempting to pass up. (I think this is why people become so angry when others bring their small children to fancy restaurants. Your food will taste the same whether or not there’s a screaming toddler at the next table. The same can, of course, not be said of the ambiance.)
My hot take is that fine dining really isn’t about food, at least not really. Of course its purveyors and propagandists must say it is, and we as consumers must either naively believe or suspend disbelief when they do, otherwise the entire thing collapses. But fine dining is this weird cultural entity where we are offered something we must consume for our very survival - food; but the food is prepared and presented in such a way as to justify an enormous price mark-up; and this then makes food a luxury item, both by limiting who can afford it, and by creating a sense of social cache which then creates things like reservations and wait lists which taps into our human weakness of FOMO; and this FOMO is what appeals to our baser, tribalistic instincts and impulses: to belong, to be safe and secure, to ensure community and affection and acceptance from other humans. I’m thinking out loud, but I think it’s so odd that fine dining in some ways completes this circle of the lowest rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but only by sling-shotting to the top rung in the middle of the transaction: by making food much more exclusive and expensive than it ever needs to be, transforming the act of simply eating into identity and self-actualization, while the fact of making food an act of exclusivity appeals to our most primal instincts, which are the ones that make us seek out food - a substance necessary to our mere survival - in the first place.
I guess I’m just pondering the arc and arrow drawn from the pages of a 1991 horror/satire novel that includes some pretty intense mockery of fine dining in the 1980s to today, where we now experience a collective uneasy reckoning with this institution. And even if we aren’t ready to discard the practice, we are at least ready to feel guilty about it.
SOURCES:
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet - and Why We’re Following by Gabrielle Bluestone
“I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor” by Oobah Butler, Vice, December 6, 2017
“How a Fake Restaurant Became London’s Top Spot on TripAdvisor” by Scott Simon, NPR, December 9, 2017
“People Still Love Fine Dining - They Just Feel Guilty About It Now” by Ali Francis, Bon Appetit, February 10, 2023