An Italian chef, his mouth moulds and a takedown that made him famous

LECCE (Italy) • The restaurant's guests had finished their appetisers of fermented ricotta puffs and a paper-thin slice of fish skin in the shape of a fish when the kitchen prepared a citrus palate cleanser called Let's Make Out.

The cooks reverently squeezed a pale orange foam into a ceramic cast of the chef's open mouth, and waiters instructed the diners to lick it out.

"The idea is love at first bite instead of love at first sight," said Floriano Pellegrino, the chef and mouth model, as he stood in the kitchen of Bros', the only Michelin-starred restaurant in the southern Italian city of Lecce. "It's supposed to be funny."

But this month, the joke was on Pellegrino, who became an object of global ridicule when a travel blogger's epically bad review of an October dinner at Bros', with its chef's kiss of the mouth mould, went viral.

"There was nothing even close to an actual meal served," wrote Geraldine DeRuiter on her blog, the Everywhereist, in which the James Beard Award-winning writer derided the "cement cell" decor, knocked a server's introduction of "rancid ricotta" and accused the restaurant of ignoring allergy restrictions when her husband's lips swelled.

Top restaurant critics jumped on the takedown bandwagon, championing a democratic revolt against a Michelin-starred restaurant with an expensive tasting menu of tiny portions and heaps of pretension.

Pellegrino's condescending response, which included drawings of men on horses and a three-page explanation of his cutting-edge approach to dining ("What is a chef? What is a client? What is good taste? What looks beautiful? What is a man on a horse?") only invited more scorn.

Former kitchen staff came out to accuse him of mistreatment and breaking promises, of punishing them by demanding push-ups, and of displaying a general pattern of bullying behaviour. ("Not everything you hear is true," Pellegrino said, when asked. "Especially in this moment, we're dealing with baseless rumours." )

CNN, The Washington Post and even The Late Show With Stephen Colbert could not resist an easy target in a world of abstract morsels already ripe for satire. DeRuiter seized on the moment with social media posts, national media appearances and a think piece about what it all meant.

On a recent afternoon at his restaurant, Pellegrino, 31, was also trying to make sense of what had happened as he stood with his celebrated head chef and girlfriend, Isabella Poti, 26, who is expecting their first child.

"It's surreal," he said as another e-mail from America ordering a cast of his mouth popped up on his phone. The casts, at €58 (S$89) apiece, had sold out, but scores more were pre-ordered, and their supplier rushed to keep up.

The couple will soon launch a Let's Make Out non-fungible token, or NFT, the blockchain-based collectible that is all the rage in the art world.

"This is a big opportunity," he said, adding that the review "only gave us publicity".

That publicity feeds the restaurant world is nothing new. The celebrity chef constellation is as much about television ratings and assorted synergies as it is substance or sustenance. The insight that both the critic and the criticised could benefit from a viral pan is less than extraordinary.

That is especially true of Pellegrino and Poti, who see themselves as avant-garde envoys of the flavours of their native Salento territory and also happen to be tireless self-promoters and unabashed hustlers.

They have promotional deals with sunglasses companies, ice cream bars, their own rugby team and a clothing brand. They have filmed videos for their menus as Adam and Eve, clad only in strategically placed leaves.

But Pellegrino cannot help harbouring raw feelings about the review. "They had a good time making fun of us," he said, adding that if the party had acted the same in a local trattoria, "they would have gotten a kick" in the behind.

Informed of the accusation of rudeness, DeRuiter was appalled.

"The attempts by the chefs of Bros' to blame their clientele for the quality of the service received," she wrote in an e-mail, "is the antithesis of what makes a good restaurant."

Misunderstood masterpiece or lousy meal, a richly deserved excoriation or hatchet job, what is clear is that Pellegrino had unexpectedly emerged as the ultimate caricature of the self-obsessed haute cuisine chef. Even more than his Michelin star, that marks how far he has come.

He lives with Poti in Scorrano, where he was born and raised.

His father "had problems with the law", he said, and his mother prepared typical dishes like horse meat in the kitchen of the family farm and agritourism hotel, where he rode horses with his two little brothers.

At 16, Pellegrino followed his mother to work in a restaurant in the resort town of Otranto. When he slept in, she dragged him by his ear, reprimanding: "Finish what you start."

He stuck with cooking, but at 18, fell out with his parents after totalling their Fiat. Worried he had fallen in with the wrong crowd, he decided to stake out on his own.

He sent a Facebook message to Ilario Vinciguerra, a noted chef outside Milan, pleading for a spot in the kitchen. Vinciguerra later introduced Pellegrino to Martin Berasategui, the celebrated Basque chef with three Michelin stars.

In 2014, Pellegrino met Poti in Otranto, where he was managing a restaurant to make money to finance his training abroad.

Over the next years, he trained at some of the most renowned restaurants in the world, and he and Poti became fixtures on lists of rising stars in Italian cuisine.

In 2015, he founded Bros' with his two brothers, though they soon went their separate ways. But all of those Bros' branding initiatives - the clothing, the new restaurants, the sports team - all hung on a single Bros' Michelin star.

Before lunch, they assembled the staff in their research kitchen where photos of what he called "the Bros' kiss" and other dishes were stuck to the wall.

As diners crossed a mat reading "Welcome to Brosland", Pellegrino used his favourite expletive to demand a perfect service. His team huddled and put in their hands.

"One, two, three," they shouted. "Be Bros!"

NYTIMES