Two words were all that Chef Ronald Rump used to describe the latest in a series of scathing reviews by establishment restaurant critics of his new DC restaurant. “Fake reviews!” he railed on his now notorious Twitter handle (@realRonaldRump).
Chef Rump had had enough. He would no longer pander to the whims and fancies of these snooty gourmet “connoisseurs”.
He had thought he would make peace, conform, and try for that coveted Michelin star. But now the critics had crossed the proverbial Rubicon. This meant war. He no longer coveted the Michelin star. For he had the star-spangled banner pinned to his chest and he wore it proud.
Citizen Rump had achieved much success as an entrepreneur and a reality television star. A global billionaire businessman of much repute, he had made his name by building the world’s largest florist chain: Rump Flowers.
He had achieved much success in his stated mission to bring fresh flowers daily to every coffee table in America and the world. Yet it was another table that had Citizen Rump angry and frustrated: The dining table.
America was once the land that gave the world the juicy hamburger, the 12-ounce steak, mac-and-cheese, pancakes. America once had sparked a gastronomical renaissance and had conquered the world through revolutionary innovations like McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Burger King and KFC among others. The same America was now languishing and retarding.
The world was no longer eating American food but instead America was now infiltrated by immigrant foods. Kebab stands, Chinese restaurants, and quesadilla food trucks had swarmed the United States. Walking around downtown Manhattan, one was now more likely to find a shawarma than a pretzel. Where had all the American food gone?
It was time to halt the descent into anarchy. For too long had America suffered at the hands of incompetent local chefs who now played second fiddle to foreigners. It was time to bring American food back into the mainstream.
America would no longer be the land where the cheese was French, the afternoon snack a quesadilla, and the pizza Italian. Cheese would now come from Wisconsin and the pizza from Brooklyn. Rump would make America Grate Again.
So citizen Roland Rump decided to become Chef Roland Rump but he wouldn’t be just any other chef. He would be the bestest, most amazing chef the world had ever seen; he would be America’s Commander-in-Chef.
At first, the media ridiculed Rump’s newfound desire to become a chef. They dismissed him as just another bored billionaire with a two-third-life crisis. Yet Chef Rump was relentless. Despite facing a maelstrom of criticism and resistance from food critics, permit issues from health and food authorities, and protests from kebab vendors, fajita food-trucks and Chinese take-aways across America, he marched ahead with his plans to set up a true red, white and blue American restaurant.
Buoyed by a rising tide of support in the South and the Mid-west, Americans sick of the gluten-free bread and organic free-range chicken, Chef Rump’s once unlikely bid for his DC restaurant right on Pennsylvania Avenue increasingly began to look like reality. He pledged to build a massive wall between his restaurant and the Mexican Cocina next door (and promised to make them pay for it). He pledged to ban patrons from certain terror-prone countries from entering his restaurant (and potentially forcing mothers and children to eat separately). He pledged to withdraw from NATO (North American Take-away Association) because he felt the interests of full-fledged restaurants such as his were not being adequately represented. He pledged to go on a food war with the Chinese restaurants in DC that were flooding the market with cheap foods.
And eventually, supported by blue-collar Americans yearning for the hey-days of American food, and on a cold, rainy January day, Citizen Ronald Rump opened his new DC eatery promising sunnier times for American gastronomy and became Commander-in-Chef Ronald Rump.
But the food critics would have none of it. The mainstream media cringed when they heard of his appointment of Reeve Cannon of Bitebarf, the editor of an online food review website, as his sous-chef. And they were aghast at his appointment of Dex Drillerson, an executive with close ties to the Russian restaurant federation as the maître d’ of his restaurant. The Rump kitchen was packed with chefs from atypical and controversial backgrounds, ranging from adherents of the KKK cuisine to those with virtually no former experience in cooking. Chef Rump remained unfazed and began implementing his vision to make American food great again.
However, a few weeks in, Chef Rump faced the realities of his new role. His promise of building a wall separating his restaurant from the Mexican one next door was met with much resistance, with Chef Gonsalves cancelling his proposed visit for a food tasting. His executive ban on patrons from certain countries entering the restaurant was rendered unconstitutional by the judiciary and was suspended. And he was engaged in a pitched battle with restaurant critics and reviewers who deemed his cooking as “chaotic, confused and completely devoid of flavour, texture or substance of any kind”.
They were most certain that Chef Rump’s restaurant would not last the duration of his four-year lease and that the Congress of Chefs would impeach him for impropriety as he was unfit for cooking.
Chef Rump took this affront personally. He truly believed that the establishment food critics were against him for he was trying to usher in a new breed of gastronomical renaissance that threatened the existing orthodoxy. The critics had grown fat on Mexican quesadillas, drunk on French wine, and had grown accustomed to cheap Chinese dumplings.
He railed against the “fake reviews” that the media wrote about him and took the battle directly to them. He would get ingredients from the “real America”: Cheese from Wisconsin, maize from Iowa, meat from Montana, chilli from Texas. No fake reviews were going to deny him the star that really mattered: The star-spangled banner.
Cringe as they may, Chef Rump marches on.
(Ameya Prabhu is a private equity entrepreneur and writer based out of Mumbai, India. He can be reached @ameyaprabhu. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)