Vanity Fair Says Trump Grill ‘Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America'

Vanity Fair just published a thorough evisceration of Trump Grill, the flagship restaurant inside President-elect Donald J. Trump’s New York City skyscraper. On Twitter, writer Tina Nguyen described the meal as a “dystopian power lunch”; that was just the tip of the critical iceberg, and the review has reignited Trump’s years-long feud with the magazine and its editor, Graydon Carter.

It’s certainly no big secret that the Trump Tower steakhouse is a terrible restaurant: Eater’s Robert Sietsema and Nick Solares sampled all the building’s dining establishments earlier this year, finding “food for timid people with digestive problems” at Trump Grill. But now that Trump’s just weeks away from being sworn in as the 45th POTUS, a cutting critique of one of his establishments carries even more weight — it’s not just a restaurant review, but a harbinger of what’s in store for the country.

Here now, the seven best lines from Vanity Fair’s review of what “could be the worst restaurant in America”:

On the attempts to make Trump Grill look like an expensive restaurant: “The restaurant features a stingy number of French-ish paintings that look as though they were bought from Home Goods. Wall-sized mirrors serve to make the place look much bigger than it actually is. The bathrooms transport diners to the experience of desperately searching for toilet paper at a Venezuelan grocery store. And like all exclusive bastions of haute cuisine, there is a sandwich board in front advertising two great prix fixe deals.”

On the service: “Our waiter, coiffed and charming, was determined to gaslight us into thinking we were having a good time. ‘Trump gets the taco bowl and the lasagna and baked ziti,’ he said, before subsequently informing the table that we could not order the lasagna or baked ziti.”

On the staff’s strange ‘talking points’: “I asked the waiter what Trump’s children eat. He didn’t seem to understand the question, or, like Marco Rubio, appeared unable to depart from his prescribed talking points. ‘Oh, I’ve shaken hands with him before, and they’re pretty normal-sized hands,’ he responded.”

On the sad filet mignon: “The plate must have tilted during its journey from the kitchen to the table, as the steak slumped to the side over the potatoes like a dead body inside a T-boned minivan.”

On the cheeseburger: “If the cheeseburger is a quintessential part of America’s identity, Trump’s pledge to ‘make America great again’ suddenly appeared not very promising. (Presumably, Trump’s Great America tastes like an M.S.G.-flavored kitchen sponge lodged between two other sponges.)”

On the infamous taco bowl: “The fried shell, meant for one, contained a party-sized amount of lettuce and ground beef suspended in sour cream and ‘Dago’s famous guacamole’, which NASA might have served in a tube labeled ‘TACO FILLING’ in the early days of the space program.”

On the cocktails: “Trump himself does not drink alcohol, a possible explanation for why the cocktails seemed to be concocted by a college freshman experimenting in their dorm room.”

Naturally, Trump tweeted out his own thinly-veiled thoughts on the review early this morning:

• Trump Grill Could Be The Worst Restaurant in America [Vanity Fair]
• Donald Trump’s Restaurant Feud With Vanity Fair Goes Way, Way Back [E]
• Diving Head First Into Donald Trump’s Culinary Abyss [E]