Five Stars or I'll Sue You
Friday, March 9, 2007
This story passes some sort of jumping the shark test for me, or is it plate of shrimp. I think it's the latter. Either way, I've now heard about it from several different sources. Here's the NYT:
THE review, published last month in The Philadelphia Inquirer, was three sentences long. It praised the crab cake at Chops restaurant in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., but said the meal there over all “was expensive and disappointing, from the soggy and sour chopped salad to a miserably tough and fatty strip steak.”
The resulting libel lawsuit was 16 pages long. It did not dispute that the steak was lousy. Rather, it said that Craig LaBan, a restaurant critic for The Inquirer, “ate a steak sandwich without bread, not a strip steak, and therefore had, and has, no personal knowledge of the quality of the Chops strip steak.”
By comparing “a $15 steak sandwich to an upscale dinner strip steak,” the suit said, Mr. LaBan and The Inquirer libeled the restaurant, hurting its reputation and business.
The suit joins a long line of court encounters between sharp reviews and the restaurateurial ego, and, if the earlier cases are a reliable guide, it is doomed.
True, a Dallas restaurant owner not long ago extracted a re-review from The Dallas Morning News in exchange for dropping a libel suit. A suit over a description of wine as “dreadful plonk” is pending in a New Jersey court. And last month a Belfast jury hit The Irish Times with a verdict of 25,000 British pounds (about $50,000) over a review that included the assertion that the chicken Marsala was “so sweet as to be inedible.”
But American judges have apparently never punished even tough, mean and wrongheaded restaurant reviews. As the federal appeals court in Manhattan put it in 1985, “reviews, although they may be unkind, are not normally a breeding ground for successful libel actions.”
Labels: Food
Posted by B Feiler at 7:03 AM
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