A zero-star review crushed her kitchen, and years later she knew it was right

Hillary Sterling still remembers the walk back into the kitchen.

The review was out, and it was as bad as a review can get. Zero stars, in her first job as a head chef. She had to face her cooks and get them ready to cook dinner that night anyway. As Sterling puts it, "it was hard because they all believed in me." They believed in the food and in that job, she says, and she felt she had let them down.

Sterling is now the executive chef at Ci Siamo, a big, loud, live fire Italian restaurant in New York City. She learned to cook in New York kitchens, including time at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill. But this is the story of the earlier job that left her feeling destroyed, and why she later decided the restaurant critic who reviewed the restaurant had a point.

It was embarrassing, she says, and it made her take a step back. She eventually left that job on her own.

Years later, she read the review again. Sterling puts it plainly: "I read the review back many years later and he was right."

Asked what she had been doing wrong, she says she was thinking too hard and trying too hard. She was also cooking American food. Sterling says, "I just had to accept that I do not know how to cook American food." "And he's right. I didn't."

Then the critic came back. According to Sterling, the same restaurant critic who gave her zero stars later gave Ci Siamo an amazing review. By her account, he put the restaurant on all his lists. She got to talk with him by phone. She calls that outcome her revenge.

When asked if she ever wrote to him, she said no. Sterling says, "I've always wanted to write him a note." In it, she would tell him that he destroyed her in that first job. As Sterling puts it: "And then I had to build myself back up."