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These VIPs aren’t afraid of getting blacklisted.
Best friends Maeghan Radice, 26, and Audrey Jongens, 26, are behind the TikTok account @TheVIPList — which has notched nearly half a million followers thanks to their brash, sometimes controversial reviews of primarily New York restaurants. Some are so fiery, they’ve gotten the duo banned by reservation booking services.
They deemed a Mavericks Montauk chicken dish a “hate crime” and claimed the Hamptons steakhouse visit gave them “PTSD.” Rezdora, a Michelin-starred Italian spot in Flatiron, was “so unbelievably underwhelming I was borderline confused.”
Trendy Casa Tua on the Upper East Side earned the title of “the worst Italian restaurant we’ve been to all year.”
“We’re not going to be censored,” Radice told The Post. “We’re just really opinionated.”
And followers love it. That Casa Tua review, posted in December, has been viewed 142,000 times as the duo reveal they were served a $500 tin of caviar with a grocery store label.
“If I wanted this I would have gone to Citarella myself and paid half the price,” Radice scoffs in the review. “At least have the courtesy to switch the label if you’re trying to play me like that.”
“The burrata was good, but what in the Ozempic is this portion size?” Jongens says.
The eggplant parm entrée was “ant sized” and the branzino the “fishiest” they’ve ever had. Four dishes they ordered allegedly never arrived. (The Post has reached out to the restaurant).
“The Hugo Spritzes were the only saving grace of the night,” they said, before the camera pans to a $1,365 bill.
They nabbed the hard-to-get reservation through a friend who had a membership with Insider NYC, the reservation and events platform that costs $1,500 per month.
“The concierge dropped our friend [who booked the reservation] as a client because of us,” Radice claimed to The Post. “They asked us to delete the video. We said we can’t do it once it’s live.”
Radice and Jongens’ notoriety precedes them. Lindsi Shine, CEO and founder of Insider NYC, told The Post that the now-banned former member was warned to alert the company before bringing The VIP List girls to any of their restaurant partners,
“They [The VIP List] don’t understand the negative impact,” Shine told The Post of their effect on a restaurant’s bottom line. “Maybe that evening wasn’t [Casa Tua’s] best evening. There’s a way to do it [give criticism] with class and kindness.”
Since the review, Radice said, Casa Tua changed caviar labels, but hasn’t taken them up on their offer of a follow-up review.
“I don’t know if they’d welcome them back,” a source close to the restaurant told The Post.
But it’s not always a bloodbath. The VIP List praised the Carlyle, saying, “The escargot was some of the best I’ve ever had.”
And the pair, who makes money through sponsored content from brands, raved about the West Village Japanese-style speakeasy Sip & Guzzle, praising it as the “only viral restaurant that tastes better than it looks” — with Radice calling the $18 mochi French fry “one the best things I’ve ever put in my mouth.”
“The real tea is that the best chefs who are confident in their products want us to come try and give our honest opinions,” she told The Post. “We’re friends with Jean Georges [Vongerichten], we’re friends with some of the top chefs in New York and they want us at their places because they want the feedback.”
Still, Mavericks in Montauk fought back last summer as a VIP List video lambasting the steakhouse racked up more than 730,000 views — with Radice and Jongens calling it “the worst $2,000 meal we’ve ever had” and claiming that they waited 2.5 hours for an appetizer.
“They were pissed about the video. They tried to spin the story saying we asked for a free meal,” Radice said of Mavericks quote to The Post last summer. “We are not the type of food bloggers to be asking for a free meal. We’re known as the food bloggers that pay.
“They bought all the watery apps to another table and still kept them on the bill. Steak tartare that was floating in water, and they still charged us full price for it.”
Mavericks declined to comment.
But one apparent fan was so angered by the review that she began “posting 50 stories a day insulting us, threatening us with a knife on her stories. Crazy stuff,” Jongens claimed.
The duo say they are always open to giving a roasted restaurant a second chance for a review.
But Radice added, “No ones ever said yes to that.”
