For those eight party people who read the Times Book Review this weekend, you might have seen Sean Wilsey, the creator of Oh Glory of It All and less gloriously ofohtheglory.com, wrote a review of Phoebe Damrosch's first book "Service Included. It's a memoir of Phoebe's stint at Per Se, Thomas Keller's triple-starred restaurant in the city. Wilsey quotes Orwell; he rambles on. And then there's a section about Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni that, if it were true, would be seriously underminery.

The Bruni chapters are cliffhangers, drawn out for drama, written in clear and at times exhilarating prose. It's great entertainment watching professionals at the top of the field spare no eccentricity (rules for staff behavior read: "No cologne, scented lotions, scented soaps, aftershave or perfume are to be worn during service"; "No first names, no flirting, no hands on the chairs, no touching the guest") or expense (Per Se, with its cruise liner decor, apparently cost $12 million to open): all to impress a single critic (spotted almost immediately).

There's no real news broken here. In New York at least, every restaurant is like the uber-Cheers for Frank Bruni, a place where everyone knows not only your name but your face and your tastes. His picture adorns the kitchens of many top New York restaurants, like a high-end version of one of those shrines you see at Ghetto Chinese Take Out places.

But the phraseology of Wilsey's sentence suggests that the rules for the staff's personal hygiene, their comportment and the $12 million dollars Keller sunk into Per Se were all for the benefit of Mr. Bruni. The sentence isn't really confusing in this regard as much as it is misleading. That mash of parenthesis, colons, colognes, and quotes imbue a causality that is, even in the most jaded of New York minds, a stretch. It's hard to believe Thomas Keller sunk $12 mil into the restaurant "all to impess a single critic." On the other hand, as Wilsey notes, Bruni did spend $10,000 of the Times' dollars there, so he is a good customer.

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