Restaurant Critic Revenge: A Dish Best Served Cold

March 9, 2007 — -- They stalk their prey day and night. They don disguises to take advantage of the element of surprise. And they're notorious for their ruthlessness and lack of mercy.

What weapons do these culprits wield? Words like "unpalatable" and phrases like "cooked until every drop of juice and joy in the thing had been … eliminated, leaving a charred husk of a shell containing meat that might have been albino walrus," "like licking Mae West's face," "fish tasted like old ski boots," or, more to the point, "toxic scum on a stagnant pond" and "meals of crescendoing monstrosity."

They're restaurant critics, and when it comes to the fragile egos of restaurateurs, the pen is certainly mightier than the sword. A vicious review can be brutal to a restaurant's bottom line, driving away customers and even putting it out of business.

With their very existence threatened, sometimes restaurant owners and chefs try to get their revenge on the reviewers by any means necessary, using verbal assaults, parodies, full-page ads in The New York Times and even lawsuits.

A few weeks ago, the owner of Chops, a steakhouse in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., filed a 16-page lawsuit against The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying that its restaurant critic's three-sentence review libeled the restaurant, harming its reputation and its business.

The meal was "expensive and disappointing, from the soggy and sour chopped salad to a miserably tough and fatty strip steak," wrote the Inquirer's Craig LaBan.

Chops owner Alex Plotkin said that LaBan had erred in his review, saying that LaBan actually had eaten a steak sandwich without bread, not a strip steak, and therefore had "no personal knowledge of the quality of the Chops strip steak."

LaBan acknowledged his mistake and offered to correct it on his blog, says Plotkin's lawyer, Dion G. Rassias. But the Chops owner is holding out for an actual retraction in the critic's newspaper column.

Rassias says that LaBan, who is known for hiding his identity through a variety of guises, has a civic duty to be fair.