Sometimes an April Fools prank can backfire on the prankster. It happened to Jonathan Gold, our esteemed colleague and Pulitzer Prize winning food critic at the LA Weekly. His joke on his longtime food photographer Anne Fishbein to meet him at Olive Garden didn't go exactly as planned.
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“I had no intention of eating lunch at the Olive Garden. I was planning
to intercept the grumpy photographer at the door and spirit her to the
Derby, a track-fueled steak house less than a minute's drive down the
street. We'd have a Sidecar or two. We'd laugh at how she'd been fooled.
There would be leftover meat for her bull terrier. Except that I was
caught in traffic and ended up at the restaurant 20 minutes after she
got there.”
What followed is a boon for the rest of us–a hilarious read. He pulls
no punches on himself, nor on the infamous Italian chain most love
to hate. As of this writing, two hours after it went live, he's garnered no less than 78 comments.
READ IT HERE.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.