The food critic can be a restaurateur’s best friend or worst nightmare. For Bob Belcher (H. Jon Benjamin) and his family, seeing Moody Foodie (Patton Oswalt), the notoriously powerful food critic, at their diner was not a pleasant occasion. In this episode of Bob’s Burgers, the Belcher family tries their best to serve a vicious food critic and faces the wrath of his review.
The episode starts with Bob going to the farmer’s market to get more kale for his burger of the day: “If Looks Could Kale.” While at the market, he runs into some of his disgruntled peers who have all suffered at the hands of a food critic they nicknamed the Moody Foodie. Bob isn’t worried because unlike his friends, who serves day old bread and used noodles, he only uses fresh ingredients to produce high quality burgers.
When Bob gets back to the restaurant, he and his family anxiously wait for the food critic to arrive. His friends inform him that Moody Foodie is a master of disguise so the family become suspicious of everyone who walks in the door.
Finally, they spot the Moody Foodie in a full Hasidic Judaic outfit. They know it’s him because he was carrying the blue napkin Bob’s friends warned him about. One by one the family try their best to serve the critic to the best of their abilities but one by one they all fail in some shape or form. Even Bob messes up by forgetting the order so he is also to blame for the bad review Moody publishes in the paper.
The bad review drives Bob into madness, first snapping on his family telling them how horrible they are at their jobs (“how bad could everybody be?!”) and then snapping on customers who were taking the review as gospel (“your dumb face is over done and dry!”). After Bob takes a little sabbatical and thinks about the white-collar nightmare it would be to get a regular cubicle job, he decides to go to the critic’s house to get a “re-do”.
H. Jon Benjamin did a fantastic job portraying a man descending into madness. Some of his best work in the series is when Bob loses his cool on his kids or on total strangers and Benjamin’s voice work did not disappoint in this episode. When Bob went out in the street giving the passers-by “critiques,” I was in stitches. Benjamin also did a great job portraying a desperate man while at the critic’s house.
Bob’s two minute vision of what a regular job would be like was glorious. It was like seeing a truncated version of Office Space with all the hilarity.
‘Moody Foodie’ was a very good episode of Bob’s Burgers that took a simple plot line but effectively milked it for all its worth. A lot of Bob’s Burgers’ best episodes usually revolve around food-culture so it was great for them to finally tackle food critics and their sheep-like readers.
What did you guys think of the episode (and this review)? Respond below in the comments (my sheep-like readers)!
