FOOD & LIFE

Restaurant critic Frank Bruni weighs in

New York tastemaker lays his tortured history with food on the table in 'Born Round'

By Mike Sutter
AMERICAN-STATESMAN RESTAURANT WRITER
Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Frank Bruni had grown so chubby he suspected that even George W. Bush couldn't ignore it.

The future New York Times restaurant critic and the future leader of the free world crisscrossed the country together as Bruni covered the Texas governor's first campaign for the presidency in 2000.

"He started out the campaign calling me Panchito," Bruni said in a conversation about his new memoir, "Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater" (Penguin Press, $25.95).

But as his weight climbed to 270 pounds on a 5-foot-11 frame, Bruni sensed a change in Bush's application of his diminutive nickname. "When he later on seemed to call me Pancho more often than Panchito, I used to say in my head, 'Oh, he's noticed the weight gain. I'm 10 pounds past the possibility of Panchito at this point.' "

"Born Round" is the story of Bruni as a husky child in a family that expressed its love and fortunes through food. He spent years struggling with bulimia, regulating his appetite with pills and laxatives, eating in his sleep and measuring his self-worth by the size of his pants.

What takes the book beyond the American parable of the unsheddable 10 pounds is the career trajectory to which it's attached. Bruni battled back from his post-Panchito nadir, working with trainers, reaching a wary detente with his impulses and losing at least 50 pounds. In 2002, he carried a healthier weight and frame of mind to Rome, where he was sent to cover the Pope. But in 2004 the paper asked if he'd like to be the restaurant critic, a job that meant he'd be eating as many as 10 major restaurant meals a week. Bruni took the job. "Maybe, I thought, this decision is insane," he writes. "But it was also irresistible, even poetic."

Bruni is leaving that job after five years to write for the paper's Sunday magazine. The American-Statesman talked with Bruni last week about "Born Round," restaurant criticism, his issues with weight and his time in Austin covering the Bush campaign.

American-Statesman: The Times announced earlier this month that culture editor Sam Sifton would take your place as restaurant critic. Why on earth would you ever leave that job?

Frank Bruni:I'm a variety freak. I think I've never been in a journalism job as long as I've been in this one, so if you had told me in the beginning it would be more than five years, I would have been shocked.

Also, the person holding this job, in the tradition of the Times, has always tried to keep a fairly low profile. When I wrote this book and when its release date was decided between me and the publisher, I always figured I'd pivot out of the job then because I'm going to want to talk about this story, I'm going to want to talk about this book.

The point has been raised that with citizen reviews on Yelp, Chowhound and other Internet portals, we can live without the traditional restaurant critic's opinion. Is that a valid point?

I think there's an argument to be made that traditional restaurant criticism is more important than ever because Yelp and that sort of thing end up being a sort of popularity contest. But on top of that, whether it's blogs, whether it's Yelp, you have no idea in those forums whether the judgments you're getting are truly independent as opposed to advocacy. You don't know who's making those ratings. You don't know if they're taking free meals or paying for them. And there's an independence and transparency to the traditional newspaper critic who's making reservations under fake names, who's paying for the meals himself or herself and not taking handouts. There's an independence that you could argue is more important than ever in an era when a lot of people can be shilling without even laying their cards on the table.

I also think we're reaching a point where there are so many voices, so many people weighing in that it threatens to become unmanageable for a consumer. I think some consumers might really want to limit their input to a few very trusted sources.

Let's talk about being a customer. In 2006, you spent a week waiting tables at the East Coast Grill in Massachusetts. You described it as a 'sanity-rattling siege,' and one of your sisters-in-arms said, 'Some people are interested in having the experience of being disappointed.' What is wrong with us as restaurant customers?

I don't think she was isolating that to restaurant customers. I think she was just saying there are people in life — and she's very right — who just like to complain. And so they kind of enter every situation, be it a restaurant or be it a romantic relationship, looking for the insult and waiting for the opportunity to complain and pity themselves. I think that human tendency gets magnified in a restaurant because people walk in there with that whole "customer is always right" mantra drilled into them. They walk in there and for the duration of those three hours, no matter who they are in their life outside the restaurant, they're in the power position because they're the one giving orders and holding the credit card in reserve.

You covered the first Bush presidential campaign for the Times, and that meant some time in Austin. Had you been exposed to Tex-Mex food before that?

Incidentally here and there, but not to the extent that I was in Austin. I'm still not sure that everybody defines Tex-Mex the same way. I would hardly call myself an expert on Tex-Mex, but I did get to eat more of it in Austin than I ever had before.

Do you have a clear memory of some of the Austin restaurants you visited?

I definitely went to Güero's. It seems like everybody hung out there. I went to Fonda San Miguel. I liked that restaurant a lot. I felt like they did that sort of food in a kind of cleaner, less gloppy, much more appealing way than a lot of tossed-off Mexican places. Mexican food in particular, I think, has been dumbed down and glopped up at the lower price points in a lot of chain places. I went out to Hudson's on the Bend at least twice. It was nine years ago. I'm pretty sure I had rattlesnake.

Some of the debate in Texas is whether sauce of any kind belongs on well-smoked brisket or ribs. Care to weigh in?

I'm an anti-sauce person. I think when you've got a really great, fatty, wonderful piece of red meat, I'm almost always inclined to not sauce it. For me that's true whether we're talking about barbecue or a great grilled steak. I definitely get how wonderful it is to dip a piece of great steak in béarnaise sauce or to have a bordelaise sauce on it. But at the end of the day, that hunk of charred meat with some fat at the edges, I want that in its pristine glory.

Dishes and ingredients flash in and out of style. Two years ago, roasted beets were everywhere. Last year, it was sliders. Truffle oil is seeping into everything. What's the ingredient of the moment?

In New York right now, it seems like you can't walk two paces without bumping into a piece of fried chicken. Fried chicken is enjoying a huge vogue, which makes a lot of sense, given the economy. And by that same token, artisanal pizza is huge. I would also add that burgers continue to keep getting bigger and bigger because as the economy remains depressed, or recessed, or whatever the correct term is, the vogue for burgers that predated the downturn has been amplified by the downturn.

In a 'Talk to the Times' session online last year, a reader asked you about your weight. Your answer was thorough — running, hitting the gym, pushing back from the table — but it wasn't freighted with the anxiety that consumed so much of your life: the throwing up, the laxatives, the delivery binges, the sleep eating. What do you hope to achieve by telling that story? It's so painfully personal.

I realized at a certain point that when it came to me and food, there was an extremely involved — and I hoped involving — story to tell. I spent a lot of years cajoling and coaching profile subjects to give me good details and to bare their souls and to be forthright and full in their accounts of their lives. I didn't think I could then turn around and write my own story and be selective and guarded and to kind of varnish the truth.

Beyond that, I really feel strongly that a lot of people have, to varying degrees of seriousness, food secrets, food problems, eating secrets, eating problems. I felt that there was a chance to write something that an enormous number of people would identify with and would identify with in a way that would help them face whatever they needed to face.

You mention the Flintstonian portions at your family's touchstone restaurant, the Remington. Why are our weight issues so frequently out of line with what we expect at restaurants?

You mean why is it that we want to be fit and trim and then we want a restaurant to throw an enormous portion at us? That question strikes at a contradiction in American life that I hope my story is a very good extreme manifestation of and mirror of.

Americans have such trouble managing their weight and are so obsessed with their weight in part because we live in a "bigger is better" society and culture. That phrase defines American living in so many ways.

You took a monumental fast-food tour for the Times. Is there hope for any of us wanting decent fast food?

I like fast food in its place and at its time. It is definitely not something that anyone should make a point of encouraging with great frequency and in great quantity because it is not healthful in the least, most of it. But there is fast food around the country at a higher level than the national chains. I remember fondly from northern Texas ... Culver's. I don't know how the Austin one is ... but I thought Culver's was a really satisfying fast-food experience.

One can actually be as discerning about fast food as one is about haute cuisine and find a lot of gradations in it. It tops out at a certain level. It's not like you can find a fast-food meal that's going to rival your experience at El Buli in Spain, but you can definitely do a lot better or a lot worse along the spectrum of fast food, for sure.

We asked readers through Twitter if they had questions for you. Here's one: 'I would love to know what unique characteristics are common among great restaurants. What makes what might be an otherwise "good" restaurant "great"?'

This isn't a particularly original answer. But the characteristic that is most common to great restaurants is they approach every dinner service and they approach every order they get as a chance at perfection. They set the bar really high.

msutter@statesman.com; 912-5902