GL: If you could dine with anyone, whom would you pick?
FB: I don’t know if this is a cheat or not, but if I could, I would bring my mother back from the dead and I would dine with her. It’s one of my great regrets that the restaurant critic adventure in my life happened many years after she was gone. She loved food and was a fantastic cook. She would’ve taken an enormous pleasure on going out on some of these meals with me. It’s a little bit of a heartbreak that she wasn’t around to enjoy any of it.
GL: What dishes will be on your Thanksgiving table this year?
FB: This Thanksgiving is unusual because my two brothers, their wives, their kids and I are all going to London for Thanksgiving. So we probably won’t even have a proper Thanksgiving this year. We’ll eat a meal that we’ll call Thanksgiving in a restaurant somewhere. But my guess is that it won’t be turkey and it won’t feel traditionally like Thanksgiving at all. It’ll be a complete detour from almost every other year.
GL: If you were to be dining at home, what could we expect to see on The Bruni Family table?
FB: The Thanksgiving holiday in The Bruni Family is always at my Aunt Carolyn’s house. Various family members have firm and unwavering ownership of various holidays. There is the largest turkey you’ve ever seen, supplemented by two additional turkey breasts so we have enough meat not only for sandwiches later in the day, but for sandwiches through the next week. There are mashed potatoes. There are yams. There’s fresh cranberry sauce, there’s canned cranberry sauce in case anyone likes that better. There are usually at least three kinds of pie ... and I haven’t even given you one quarter of the menu. The Bruni Family’s attitude toward food is that unless there’s so much food that you practically can’t move throughout the house then the host has not shown ample generosity and indulgence.
GL: What do you see as the next big trend in the food world?
FB: I think in the food world, whether it’s what people are buying and cooking at home or in restaurants, people are getting more and more painstaking about the production and use and showcasing of quality ingredients. Increasingly the food world is about producing and consuming the very, very finest example of each thing you can get. The most beautiful tomatoes produced in the perfect circumstances, or the best chicken that has been raised and nurtured. I think this kind of exaltation of ingredients and focus on how to ring the maximum majesty out of a given vegetable, a given animal, a given grain, I think that is an ongoing preoccupation that is going to intensify.
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