‘Universal girl experience’: Women talk smack about atrocious dessert at fancy restaurant, until the waiter asks if they’re enjoying it

If there’s one thing we’ve learned after three seasons of The Bear, it’s that there’s a dark side to even the greatest kitchens on Earth. Sometimes that dark side is an executive chef who looks a lot like Joel McHale, other times it’s many long years of family trauma culminating in the death of your brother. But every now and again, it’s nothing more than a crappy dessert.

See, there’s an edge to crappy desserts that make them far more dangerous than other forms of kitchen darkness. Indeed, you can quit Joel McHale’s kitchen or go to counseling to unwrap your past, but a crappy dessert is bulletproof unless the patron actually admits that it’s crappy, and unfortunately, TikTok‘s @brynneee_ keeps far too polite company.

One gorgeous evening at the Belvedere Restaurant in Italy’s Ravello commune, Brynn and her friends decided to treat themselves to a fancy dinner. They were in the middle of gorging themselves on an equally fancy dessert, but the horror on her friend Andi’s face said it all: this is one rum cake that needs to disappear forever before it wreaks more havoc on unsuspecting palates.

This was just part one of the panic that would ensue that evening. No sooner had Andi discreetly expressed her disdain for the mortifying morsel placed in front of her than one of the waiters came by asking how they were finding the dessert. “So good,” said Andi, an utterance that promptly destroyed both the concept of honesty and the waiter’s hopes of getting that menu item tossed.

That’s no joke, either; most commenters — some of whom claim to have hosting experience in a vein such as this — assured Brynn that that waiter was 100% on a mission to collect evidence about how bad that rum cake was.

Of course, a restaurant like this wouldn’t just name it “rum cake” and call it a day; Belvedere’s take on the dish— per the restaurant’s official dessert menu — is called “The Baba,” and consists of creamy Neapolitan baba (which is a small cake saturated in a syrup made from hard liquor), along with a side of Cicerenella liqueur-boosted ice cream topped with seeds from an anise flower. For those of you wondering, Cicerenella tastes like oranges, anise seeds taste like licorice, and the whole dessert tastes like regret.

Luckily, the dessert only ran the girls $18. Considering the cheapest meal you can eat at this restaurant is $100 for two items consisting of anything from the Earth Tradition, Sea Tradition, Vegan, and Let Yourself Be Guided courses, a sub-$20 dessert is a nice sight even if it does turn out to be deplorable.

And for the record, Brynn recommends the restaurant as a whole, so if there’s a spontaneous jaunt to Italy in your future, don’t write off Belvedere because of one lousy rum cake.