Once in Paris, I came across an article by Francois Simon, the food critic of Le Figaro, criticising the list of the world’s 50 best restaurants published by a British trade magazine. The wrath of the respected French foodie was most likely triggered by the fact that not a single French restaurant had made it to the top ten, and the first spot was taken by some obscure Danish (!) eatery with a “minimalist” menu based on roots and herbs. The famous Parisian Le Chateaubriand, with its three Michelin stars, scooped just 11th place – the fact which, in Simon’s highly refined (if only in the culinary sense) opinion was “hilariously surreal”, no less. “How, tell me, is it possible to come to a decision that an excellent creperie is better than a delicious couscous restaurant, a Japanese sushi bar or an Italian trattoria?” he fumed and proceeded to branding the whole list “idiotic”. “There’s no such thing as the best restaurant in the world,” he concluded.

He might be right here (albeit I somehow think that had the list had been compiled by a French source, not by some miserable Les Anglais, with shepherd pie as their biggest gastronomic achievement, and had it been consequently topped by French restaurants, the respected food critic wouldn’t have been that categorical in his appraisal): with taste – like beauty - being a hugely subjective experience very much in the mouth (if not the eye) of the beholder, the world’s best restaurant is rather hard to define.
It is easier with the world’s worst restaurant, and I know exactly which one it is – Restaurant “Mari”, attached to the eponymous (“Mari”) hotel in the no-less-eponymous Turkmenistan town of Mari on the Afghan border.

I had a misfortune to stay at that hotel once – many years ago.
I remember a bearded Turkmen woman solemnly giving me the key to the hotel’s only “luxury suite”. The room was filthy, semi-dark and smelled like a mortuary. It was forty-two degrees of heat, but the air-conditioner did not work. Nor did the shower. The biggest surprise, however, was that I was supposed to share the room and the only medium-sized bed with a male Communist party official from Ashkhabad. He was snoring and fretting on his side of the bed all night, and I when I finally managed to nod off, I dreamt of an earthquake…
As for the hotel’s restaurant, it was swarming with fat Central Asian flies, and only had eggs and cucumbers on the menu (not to count the flies which often fell onto the patrons’ plates and were matter-of-factly consumed by some as the only bits of “meat” they could ever hope to taste) – but that proved enough: after just one meal of fried eggs with cucumbers and flies, I got severe food poisoning and nearly died.

Now, unlike some pseudo-omniscient ramblings of French and/or British restaurant critics, food poisoning and the resulting NDE (near death experience, thoroughly investigated by Dr. Raymond Moody in his bestselling book “Life After Life”), are very powerful qualifying criteria which cannot be disputed. So rest assured, if you happen to kick the bucket after a meal at a restaurant, you (or rather your grieving relatives and friends) can easily and without fear of repercussions brand that particular catering establishment the worst restaurant in your life….

Let’s, however, try to forget about extremes and define what an ordinary “bad” restaurant should be like.

Here I have to refer again to my fellow Italomaniac, Australian writer David Dale, who in his book, with a long and somewhat pretentious title “The Obsessive Traveller Or why I don’t steal towels from great hotels any more” (meaning that he still does from the not-so-great ones?), came up with some “rules of thumb” to help travellers in avoiding bad restaurants:

“1. Never eat in a restaurant that revolves or floats.
Never eat in a restaurant that is more than 10 metres above the ground.
Never eat in your hotel dining room
A restaurant that has a pepper grinder on every table is likely to be good (to me, a huge pepper grinder on every table would rather symbolise a powerful, yet repressed, masculinity of the owner – VV).
A restaurant that offers “thousand island dressing” as an option for your salad is likely to be bad (no comment – VV).
Greek food is always better outside Greece than inside it (hm… disputable - VV).
There is no such thing as a bad Thai restaurant (? – V)
There is no such thing as a good Dutch restaurant (?? – VV)
There is no such thing as a good restaurant in Las Vegas.
Oolican grease is not for the White Man (???-VVV).”

Dale also quotes “the great American food writer Calvin Trillin who urged to beware places with names like “La Maison de la Casa House Continental Cuisine” to which I could add that one should also stay away from restaurants with flags and/or banners above the entrance…

Having summed it all up and having discarded the irrelevant bits, we may safely conclude that, according to David Dale, your archetypal bad eatery would be a revolving Dutch restaurant on the top floor of a Las Vegas hotel. I can add that, in line with ever growing and all permeating political correctness in the USA, it would probably be known not as restaurant, but as “food center”, with the waiters calling themselves “servers”: “Hi, my name is Jack/Gill and I will be your server today.”. Those genderless “servers” would repeatedly interrupt your meal with questions like “Is everything ok?” and “Are you still working on your steak, Sir?”

Eating in such a restaurant is indeed like carrying out a boring and joyless chore …

Before starting my quest for a bad Italian meal, I needed some more objective signs of a clearly bad restaurant. In our electronic age, I didn’t need to subject myself to many more life-threatening Mari-style near-death experiments, but simply did a “signs of a bad restaurant” Google search. The results exceeded all expectations. The subject of bad restaurants was obviously close to the heart of the broad Internet-browsing masses and was routinely raised in a number of virtual discussions. The participants of a lively “digital spy” UK forum on food and drink were able to add the following important bad-restaurant signs to the list:
menu with pictures
huge menu
laminated menu
lots of “ready-meal packaging, or rats (sic – or rather quite sickening – VV)” in the bins area
a Brake Bros (UK’s cheap wholesale food delivery company – VV) lorry in the restaurant car park
chavs (a UK slang for “rough youths”, from Romani “chav” – child” – VV) in the kitchen; one participant has narrowed it down to “spotty-faced teenagers who can’t speak a word of English, even though born, raised and taught in the UK, serving you”
empty dining area
flies
caterpillars in the salad, as discovered by one captious lady
dirty toilets
stink
food served in cardboard boxes (I only experienced this once onboard an RAF flight to the Falklands – VV)
a squashed cockroach on the stairs…

And so on. The participants of the forum could be forgiven for being at times somewhat maximalist and extremist. If to try and collate their meaningful signs with those of David Dale and myself, the extended description of a typical bad restaurant would probably read roughly like that:

A totally empty and stinking revolving Dutch “food center”, with huge laminated and colourful menus, filthy toilets, rats in the backyard, cockroaches on steps, flies on walls, caterpillars in salads, pimpled deaf-and-mute, or – in the best of scenarios - dyslexic youngsters as both cooks and waiters (sorry, servers) on the top floor of a dodgy hotel in Las Vegas.

Pretty definitive, isn’t it?

I was about to travel to Italy and check whether I could successfully apply this pattern in my quest for a bad Italian meal, but, on reflection, decided to try it first closer to home (purely as a warming up exercise of sorts) - in … Hertfordshire, or to be more exact, in the old market town of Hitchin. Why Hitchin? Simply because, encouraged by my successful Google search for the signs of a bad restaurant (see above), I narrowed it down to “Bad Italian restaurants in Hertfordshire” - and Bella Vita, Hitchin popped up second. The first was The Globe in Letchworth Garden City, conveniently situated in the very street where I live, just a couple of block away from our cottage. The Globe was bad indeed. Yet starting my search with having a meal in it was problematic for a couple of reasons:
It was not Italian
It was not a restaurant
It didn’t exist any more having gone bust several months earlier
True, I once had my life’s worst spaghetti Bolognese in that ill-fated local. The dish was obviously acquired in bulk – prefab and frozen, and was hastily and insufficiently warmed up in a microwave before being put in front of me. But “horrible Italian food”, it seemed was not on my list of bad restaurant signs. And besides, The Globe was no more – a pitfall of the dispassionate Internet search!

“I went to the la Bella Vita for the first and last time on Saturday and had a terrible experience. We had booked a table for 8.45 and when we arrived we were not greeted and had to hang about in the doorway for a good five minutes. A waitress eventually told us to go through to the bar at the back where the barman took our drinks order and brought us the menu. We \asked if we could have some olives or bread with our wine and were told no…”

“Bella Vita, Hitchin, has an extensive menu with fantastic fish dishes – top class cuisine. friendly staff and unusually large character rooms… Superb. We will return. What a great place…”

These two rather controversial Internet reviews were next to each other on the same page of the same hotel-and-restaurants reviews site. So different they were in tone and conclusions that I started wondering whether the first one was supplied by a nit-picking competitive restaurateur from across the road (big deal: had to wait for 5 min; and you don’t normally have “bread and olives” with an aperitivo!) and the second - by Giorgio, La Bella Vita’s owner and manager of more than 30 years standing (according to the restaurant’s website) himself.

I had to go and see for myself.

So, with my lovely partner Christine who had agreed to play a role of my incognito research assistant, off we drove to Bella Vita, which promised on its website “the true charm of Italy”. Even more promisingly (for my purposes), the restaurant was part of the eponymous hotel – a firmly established (see above) good sign of a bad restaurant.

The “true charm of Italy” was only 3 miles away…

Giorgio himself meets us at the door and leads us to the bar in the far corner of the restaurant. It is a very old building, the ceilings are low and pierced – as if skewered -with Tudor beams, on one of which I spot a “Mind Your Head” sign. Indeed, what are we trying to find here? Are we mad? Should we turn back?

The moment we sit down at the bar, a young waiter starts fluttering above our heads, brilliantly corresponding to the colloquial Czech word for “waiter” – “Pan Vrchny” (‘Mr Upper’), repeatedly urging us to have a drink. We refuse and say we’ll have some wine with our meal. The set menu for £16.95 consists of two courses, with neither antipasti nor primi piatti – not very Italian.
The room has no windows and feels airless – where is the promised “charm of Italy”?
In the corner, two bespectacled men are leafing through piles of documents while drinking Pelegrino mineral water. My hope is they are hotel (or perhaps restaurant) inspectors whose presence would encourage the staff to do their best to please the customers even if just to throw some dust into the “inspectors” incorruptible and clear Pelegrino-washed eyes… On my penultimate day in the USSR before defection, I was lucky to have had a great slap-up meal in a normally horrible restaurant due to the presence of some sort of “government controllers”…

Giorgio soon returns and takes us to our table which turns out to be beautifully set: flowers, snow-white napkins, polished silver cutlery. The sight of a bottle of Fiorile, Sicilian house wine which we have ordered, cheers me up even further.
“I leave the wine to breathe for 3 hours,” says Giorgio filling our glasses.
I suppress a laugh: having done some research on the subject, I know that leaving wine to “breathe” does absolutely nothing for its taste and is a good example of the so-called wine snobbery… But, of course, I don’t say this aloud…

“Do you have a large pepper grinder?” I enquire remembering one of D. Dale’s signs of a good restaurant. And immediately blush in fear of being misunderstood (“pepper grinder” is sometimes used as a conversational euphemism for “penis”: you can’t ignore its obvious phallic shape!)
But Giorgio doesn’t get offended: “They don’t have them in classy Italian restaurants, like ours; only in some cheaper trattorias…”
And I recall with sudden clarity that indeed I have never seen those massive priapic utensils in Italy… It is only in Britain that they offer to spray your food with ground pepper from a grinder. In Italy, they just bring you some grated Parmigiano!

At a table next to ours is a group of posh elderly gentlemen, “the old boys”. I sit with my back to them, but can hear from their accents that they are stuck-up. When I gain some courage and turn back I see that I was right: they do look like retired British Expeditionary Force officers, or like some well-bread and puffed up British bulldogs – all wearing tweed jackets and ridiculous regimental ties. One of them is so aristocratic that he can hardly speak, only blows up his cheeks and guffaws semi-audibly.
“My duck is tough…” he burbles to the waiter. I wonder whether he said “duck” or “dick”– cannot quite discern from his guffaw… At his age, however, the latter scenario seems much less likely than the former…
“It is tough and tasteless,” he carries on. “I am really disappointed…” He pronounces “disappointed” with a deliberate lisp and hardly opening his mouth, so that it sounds like “disjointed”…

It suddenly occurs to me that “Tough Duck” could be a good name for a Chinese take-away in Hitchin…

As our order arrives, I gasp: presentation and service are both perfect. My veal is tender and nearly melts in my mouth. Christine’s fish is nice and fresh too… And the wine tastes fresh and fruity. Could it be that leaving it to “breathe” was indeed beneficial? In any case, it didn’t seem to do it any harm…
“It’s like being on holiday,” says my hard-working daily-commuter partner Christine using one of her biggest forms of praise. “They have a nice English-Italian ambience here,” she adds.

True: probably every country in the world has its own Italian ambience…

Giorgio comes up to our table and tells us he travels to Billinsgate Market in the London Docklands twice a week to get fresh fish. Billinsgate is a wholesale seafood market on the Isle of Dogs. It opens up at 4 am, wraps up by 7 am and is about 50 miles away from Hitchin - quite a journey…

Listening to Giorgio, I recall a small Italian restaurant, La Tavernetta, in Folkestone, Kent, the place of my protracted “exile” in 2002-2004. It was run and owned by an elderly Italian man called Giancarmine who liked to describe his Folkestone experience as “35 years of madness”, but in his heart of hearts loved the town and made sure his restaurant stayed open and offered good Italian food every single day of the year. Like Giorgio, he was a member of that that brave cohort of Italian restaurateurs, the fearless ambassadors of pasta and lasagne, who came to Britain in 1950s-60s and started the so-called “Trattoria Revolution”, when many people in the UK seriously believed that spaghetti indeed grew on trees. They opened their restaurants against all odds offering the British new food and drinks, new style and new attitudes to life. La Trattoria Terrazza in Romily Street, Soho, started by Marco Cassandro and Franco Lagatolla in the late 1950s, soon became the most famous and influential restaurant in London, ushering in a true revolution in Britain’s social culture and having the likes of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan among its regular customers. It was followed by Alvaros’ in Chelsea in the early 1960s and by many-many more…
What drove and still drives these members of the Italian restaurant Diaspora? Not just the money, I assume… “35 years of madness”… Indeed… Their efforts, it has to be said, were not in vain: according to a recent survey, 47% of the British respondents named Italian food as their absolute favourite, well above Chinese, French and even “English” (if there’s such a thing).

Our dinner at La Bella Vita did in a way contain “the true Magic of Italy”, as promised by the restaurant’s website, despite, or possibly, also because of the ‘old boys’ tough duck experience, for who on earth orders duck in an Italian seafood restaurant???

What an excellent start to my quest! Italy, it seems, can be found anywhere – in Hitchin, Folkestone, London… It is a category of the soul, rather then just a country; a state of mind, not just of geography, and much-much more than simply food…

Giorgio is holding my jacket for me: “Now that you’ve paid the bill, I can look after you properly,” he chuckles. “Next time – bring your wife!” He winks at Christine…

I say that I will… And wink at Christine too…

How come La Bella Vita popped up in my search for “bad Italian restaurants”, you may ask? I found the explanation later, having repeated the search. The entry on another Italian restaurant, L’Artista, in Letchworth was on the same page and started with the sentence: “Been there many times, never had a bad meal”.
Search engines pick up the programmed words - in this case “restaurant” and “bad” - without thinking… They may have dexterity and speed, but no intellect and no taste….

I then decided I would not search for bad (or good for that matter) restaurants on the Internet ever again…

Driving back to Letchworth from Hitchin that evening, I suddenly realised why the duck could have tasted tough: ‘the old boy’ must have had no teeth!

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