I received this mysterious message yesterday (subject line: "Critical Condition") from someone who must have thought it very important, because it was sent via Blackberry at almost midnight. The sender's identity is unknown. The only clues are a strong animosity towards exclusive noodle bar Momofuku, a disdain for Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni, and an intimate knowledge of cancer doctors, all rolled up in a jet-set lifestyle and finished with (I'm guessing) about a fifth of Jim Beam. What does it all mean? Please reveal yourself, imperious drunken stranger! The full message for you to analyze, after the jump.
Frank Bruni is pissed! The New York Times' omnipotent restaurant critic (pictured) today reviews a new Tribeca restaurant named Ago, which is owned in part by actor Robert De Niro. And Bruni's experience there is proof for the entire restaurant business that no matter how popular, expensive, or exclusive your place is, it is still quite possible to receive a terrible review if you act like an idiot. Please: Learn some lessons from Ago's fiasco. Here is what not to do when your restaurant is being reviewed:
Note to restaurateurs: spilling wine on Frank Bruni's dining companions is not the fastest way to his heart. That's what we learn from the Bruni's hilariously abusive zero-star review of Ago, Robert De Niro's Italian restaurant in the Greenwich Hotel. Said downpour of sauvignon kicked off his train-wreck of a meal. But this wasn't any old spill—"I'm talking about the "Poseidon Adventure" of wine spills. Shelley Winters could have done the backstroke in it." And this happened before Bruni was even seated. Somehow, some way, everything went downhill from there. Other amusingly terrible aspects of his dinner:
Momofuko Ko is, as NYT food critic Frank Bruni tells us, "a new restaurant from David Chang, and David Chang is at this point the New York restaurant world's equivalent of Tiger Woods or Roger Federer." It has 12 seats. Their democratic Web 2.0 booking system requires everyone—yes, everyone—to go online at 10 a.m. and make reservations for the limited number of seats available that week. We love the idea. No calling Graydon Carter's office for a chance at the Waverly: here's the one place in New York where your precious connections and friends can't get you preferential treatment over the slobbering masses lining up for their share of the fancy chow-time.
Did you know that people who write about food for a living tend to be fatties? It's true! Except for the Times' dreamy James Bond of gastronomy, Frank Bruni. The point is that some food critics have realized that scarfing down daily heapings of pork bellies and passing it off as a professional expense is no guarantee they won't keel over from a heart attack, and is a guarantee they will have a hard time seeing their own genitals. Even pork-loving wild man Mario Batali is threatening to start exercising! By chasing a greased sow in his Crocs, perhaps. But even while some of the wiser gluttons are easing back, says the Times, their stupider brethren—embodied by one man—just can't stop with the sausage:
Bruni is an American journalist, author, and former restaurant critic for The New York Times.
Times restaurant critic (and the man I'd fourth most like to have lunch with before I go to London) Frank Bruni (first, Baryshnikov; second, my boss Choire; third, my own father) likes himself some Ssam Bar as best restaurant of 2007 (though as Eater mentions, it is really a 2006 affair. Allen & Delancey, Soto, Anthos and Insieme made the cut. FR.OG was among the worst. Ditto Wakiya. [NYT]
New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni is "a sucker for overpriced candles," is currently obsessed with Travis' second album, The Man Who, and loves the New England Pats. Also! Sometimes he eats baguettes so hard that "I sometimes have to change my shirt afterward because of the jam stains." Mignon! [Refinery 29]
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.
Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni really really really really didn't like Harry Cipriani, the mainstay of the Cipriani restaurant empire. He gave it no stars and used words like "robbery," "generic," and "confused" in his review. He also used phrases like "sexual harrassment" "highway robbery" and "bizarre mix of indulgence and deprivation." We're only disappointed that perverse and often baffling" didn't make the cut. [NYT]
New York Times restaurant critic (and totally self-appointed head language bitch on campus of us all!) Frank Bruni so rightly rails against the "semantic pox" of restaurantspeak today. Examples: The use of the first person singular ("How are we enjoying the quail?"); the overusage of "enjoy" ("How are we enjoying the quail?"); and pleonastic phrases such as "Pardon my reach." [NYT]
Times restaurant boy Frank Bruni has a knack for straddling the line between needlessly erotic and erotically needless turns of phrase. "Anytime Anne Burrell gets near hot oil, I want to be around," he writes of Centro's chef in today's one-star review. The last time Bruni was in the company of potentially oil-slathered women though he couldn't resist quoting Diana Ross and checking his Blackberry. [NYT]
One of the things about being a stay-at-home writer is that you have perhaps a little bit too much time to peruse and write blogs! We were reminded of this by chick lit author Jennifer Weiner's rant in the comments of the Times' 'Paper Cuts' blog, which she continued on over at her own blog 'Snark Spot' (really). She has a bone to pick with an author who'd yearningly mentioned her books' consistent presence on bookstore shelves. "Be careful what you wish for, oh shelfmate o' mine! If you wrote chick lit—provided it was any good—you would indeed find your books on the shelf of most every store. But your books would not be reviewed twice by the Times."
New York Times restaurant critic Francis Bruni one-stars Gemma in the Bowery Hotel today. (We said it was like TGIFridays mixed with the set of "8 1/2" with a nod to the boudoir scene in "When Doves Cry.") Salient Bruni-isms include, "Gemma loves candles the way Liberace did," and that it's "a cheat sheet of a restaurant whose proprietors take fewer risks than a hurricane-insurance agent in Nebraska." Well, according to FEMA—which has declared 35 disasters mostly having to do with severe storms in Nebraska in the past 48 years—Gemma should be pretty dang experimental. But we see his point.
