In 2004 Frank Bruni stepped into one of the most powerful positions in the culinary world — restaurant critic for the New York Times. After five years and countless memorable meals, Bruni penned his best-selling memoir, Born Round, to express his seductive yet tormented relationship with food. The acclaimed author and critic spoke to Gourmet Live about his most memorable food moment, his go-to meal for entertaining and what dishes you can expect to see on The Bruni Family Thanksgiving table.
Gourmet Live: What led to your initial interest in food as a career?
Frank Bruni: I came upon food late in my career. I was always a lover of food and restaurants in particular, but I was having a more polyglot journalistic career, and at a given junction the people at The Times said, “What about turning your attention toward restaurants?” I was always an enormous restaurant consumer. I was always someone who felt that going out to eat was one of life’s greatest recreations and pleasures. When I traveled, where I ate at night was crucial to me as a big part of plotting any trip.
GL: What was the most memorable moment you had as restaurant critic of the New York Times?
FB: I had lunch one day at Masa in the Time Warner Center [in New York City], which is such an incredibly exclusive-in-its-own-way restaurant. It’s expensive, it’s small, it’s quiet. Masa then, and maybe now, would be open for lunch provided it had reservations, or even a reservation. I went there with Eric Asimov, my colleague and the [New York Times] wine critic, and we went there to find that we were the only ones in the restaurant and that it was open for lunch that day because there was a single reservation for two, which was ours.
The main person there was Masa himself, and we sat at the main sushi counter and had this two-and-a-half hour pre-determined, small course by small course, piece of sushi by piece of sushi meal. Everything was being prepared for us in real time and handed to us by Masa himself. It was almost like two acolytes and their priest in a temple. It was so quiet and so focused and so indulgent and so heavenly. I just remember thinking, “I have died and gone to professional heaven.”
GL: Do you cook?
FB: I’m a really erratic and sporadic cook. I live alone and have lived alone for most of the last ten years with some exceptions, and I don’t really enjoy cooking for one. My days are so frenetic and frantic in different ways and I don’t find I have a lot of time to cook. So occasionally I’ll cook, but it’s not with the steady, committed passion of a true home cook.
GL: If you are going to cook, do you have a go-to dish?
FB: If I’m having people over I almost always make rack of lamb because it looks so nice with the Frenched bones and it is so fail-safe, unless you overcook it. If you buy a nice rack of lamb, it’s easily roasted and takes on a bit of individual personality by putting some sort of crust on it. There are a million recipes where you coat the fatty side with mustard and put some combination of breadcrumbs or corn meal and herbs. It’s easy to have ten rack of lamb recipes in your back pocket.
GL: What is your least favorite food?
FB: I’m not really fond of anchovies and sardines. Toward sardines, I’m agnostic. Toward anchovies, I’m a little bit hostile. But that said, I like a Caesar salad that doesn’t have whole anchovies in it. I like the flavor that anchovies in a restrained measure can impart.
GL: Do you have any guilty food pleasures?
FB: Tons. My whole life is one guilty food pleasure.
GL: What inspired you to write Born Round?
FB: It never occurred to me to write a memoir, let alone an eating-specific memoir, until I got the job as restaurant critic. When I was talking with friends about the job and when I was weighing it in my own head, I was struck by, “Wow, I’m considering taking a job that binds me to food.” And that’s just so incredibly ironic given that most of my life I’ve been both seduced and tormented by food in equal measures. I thought, “If this works out okay, and helps me make sense with my past issues with food, it might be really interesting to tell the story of my relationship with food from the vantage point of having, ultimately, a career of it.” That suggested that there was some sort of culmination of a journey or a destination.
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