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Frank Bruni Opens Up On the Life of A Restaurant Critic
By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 23, 2008
Modified Oct 23, 2008
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By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 23, 2008
Modified Oct 23, 2008
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Frank Bruni, the senior restaurant critic at the most influential paper in America, has submitted to a loooong Q&A from Times readers. Some fun revelations: His biggest tab was probably at Per Se, somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,300 for a party of four. He says there was "a Jeopardy answer/question thingie that said something like, 'Frank Bruni spends $325,000 annually on his beat.'" Not true; it's way less than that. He eats out at least six nights a week, and on the rare occasion he eats at home, Bruni orders a "messy, sloppy, undistinguished Chinese delivery. There's nothing as thrilling as refined, accomplished, superbly prepared food. But there's also fun in uneventful food." Also, "some restaurants are so ludicrously loud that no more than 15 percent of their customers could possibly want it that way, and the servers must be in aural and vocal and psychic agony by night’s end."
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John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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