AA Gill Shoots a Baboon, Incites Twitter Tantrum

by Blaine Metzgar | October 27, 2009 at 01:45 pm

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Restaurant critic AA Gill incited a Twitter tantrum after his column in the Sunday Times in which the controversial culinary connoisseur seemingly boasted about shooting a baboon. Not long after, AA Gill's name shot up to the top spot on Twitter's trending topics fuelled by snarky and/or disgusted tweets calling out Gill for his monkey-murdering ways.

I shot a baboon in Africa, last Wednesday, just after lunch. Shot it dead. Those of you of a nervous disposition should look away now. This article contains graphic scenes and may upset the sensitive.

That's how the review opened; no mention of a restaurant, food, or otherwise just raw baboon bloodshed. Gill preceded to use half of his column setting up a dainty little scene: likening himself to Robert Redford in Out of Africa, casually longing for his Stella McCartney hat, and straight-up monkey mortality.

I noticed that, when it was alive, I thought about the baboon as a thing. Now he’s dead, I’m posthumously anthropomorphising him, and that was one of the reasons I killed. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films: guns and bodies, barely a close-up of reflection or doubt. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative?

Keep in mind, this is supposed to be a restaurant review, of a restaurant in London, not Tanzania, a restaurant that does not feature bush meat on the menu. So what was the point of Gill's, eerily insightful, psychological fantasy culminating in baboon assassination? No clue.

Eventually Gill gets around to mentioning The Luxe, the actual should've-been-reviewed-restaurant, but not before admitting that his half-column worth of simian snuff had nothing to do with, frankly, anything.

Any connection between the wildlife in this column and this week’s restaurateur is purely coincidental.

The remainder of the column was an actual restaurant review, but the twitterverse was far from satisfied enough with the actual review to ignore Gill's equally morbid and irrelevant introduction inciting a tantrum of trending topic-worthy proportions, expressing their malcontent in 140 characters or less.

Gill's editorial hiccup and subsequent Twitter-wrath came just one week after, fellow Britian-based columnist, Jan Moir snagged to top trending spot for her completely uncalled-for allegations regarding the late Stephen Gately's last night.