Would Not Recommend

Description

He kills the people who rate things. The critics, the bloggers, the ones who can end a kitchen with three sentences — and he plates each death like a dish, then posts the recipe online with a rating of his own. One star. Would not recommend.

The pastry critic glazed and finished like one of her own desserts. The street-food blogger left in a setup straight out of his most savage review. Food editor Marguerite Sow recognizes the references because she edited half the takedowns these people wrote — the cruel little reviews that closed restaurants and broke chefs and racked up clicks. Someone read them all. Someone took notes.

The recipes go up within hours, anonymous, immaculate, captioned with a star rating and a line of feedback aimed at the dead. They’re going viral, which is the point; the killer wants an audience the way every critic secretly does. Marguerite knows where the comment threads lead, and she knows her own byline sits on the meanest review of all. She could quit, scrub her name, vanish. She opens a fresh document instead and starts writing the only review that might draw him out.

A nasty, knowing horror-comedy about the people who judge for a living, this one serves irony at killing temperature. Everybody’s a critic. He’s just the only one who follows through.

Pull up a chair and read the reviews. You’re on the menu now.