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.
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.