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>>female presenter: We're very happy today to welcome Frank Bruni, author of "Born Round:
A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite." Frank Bruni was named the Restaurant Critic
for the New York Times in April 2004. Before then, he was a newspapers Rome bureau chief,
White House reporter, the lead correspondent for George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign
and a frequent contributor to the Sunday Times Magazine. He's the author of the New York
Times bestseller; "Ambling into History by George W. Bush" and his restaurant related
articles for The Times have appeared in each of the last three editions of the Best Food
Writing in America. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for
his work before The Times at the Detroit Free Press and he's currently reporter at large
for The New York Times and he lives in New York City. So, please give a warm welcome
to Frank Bruni.
[applause]
>>Frank: Hey. Thanks for, thanks for having me here. I really appreciate it. This is an
amazing place. I think my colleague, Maureen Dowd, came here about a year ago and I remember
reading her column about Google, but until you kind of see this whole campus it doesn't
really, you can't really appreciate what this is. You guys work in a very charmed, charmed
environment. I hope everyone's happy here and likes it. I'll swap, I'll swap The New
York Times for Google with you any day.
Cynthia said, "What kind of perks do you have at The Times?" And I thought for awhile and
I realized none. We have, we have the pleasure of saying you work for The New York Times
and sometimes that opens doors, but there's no free food, there's no gym, no nap, no nap
stations, none, nothing of the kind. I, about a year ago, I wrote this book. Well, I wrote
this earlier, but a year ago this book came out in hardcover. It's called Born Round.
In hardcover, it was called The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater. This, the title has
now changed. In the soft cover, the subtitle is A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious
Appetite. And it's a book I wrote because while there, while there were many, many food
memoirs out there, many of which I've read over time because it was just a genre I enjoyed,
I didn't feel like there were any that talked about the flip-side or the dark side of being
obsessed with food.
Every food memoir I read everyone just talked about kind of going into a swoon and falling
into a field of soft arugula while not upsetting your champagne flute and the foie gras in
the background. And almost everybody I met when I started writing predominantly about
food, as The New York Times' restaurant critic, everybody I met in the kind of food journalism
world was someone who was extremely, extremely disciplined about their food consumption.
They were not these wonder people who had furnace-like metabolisms who never had to
worry about what they eat. In fact, they were the most, they were the most kind of vigilant,
mindful eaters I'd ever met, but no one ever talked about that as they wrote all of this
lovely prose that exhorted people to kind of pull, pull a chair up to the table and
dig in.
So, I wanted to write a food memoir. I wanted to write a book about my relationship with
food, which was a very unusual one in terms of the drama and comedy of it that, that kind
of told a fuller story about what food can do to people and how food can trip people
up. I was someone who, in the course of my life, went on every fad diet there ever was;
yo-yoed over time, back and forth between about 180 pounds to about 280 pounds. And
I thought telling that story from the vantage point, from the ironic vantage point, of someone
who ended up making, making eating his profession made a lot of sense.
I, I, what I'd mostly like to do today is just answer questions people have because
I find everyone has questions about what it's like to be a restaurant critic, what it's
like to be The New York Times' restaurant critic. We can talk about journalism in general,
Google's effect on it--no, I'm just kidding.
[laughter]
We can do whatever, but just to give you a little bit more of a flavor of the book, I,
I just thought I'd and to kinda run out the clock a little bit, I thought I'd just read,
read one passage. The book goes through pretty much a whole life told from the vantage point
of food, but whenever I had little adventures along the way I tried to put them in here
if I thought they made for good stories. Right before I became the restaurant critic, I was
The Times' Rome bureau chief; that's the title they use. We have one correspondent in Rome,
so, you're the bureau chief of one.
[laughter]
But that's the title they give you so we use it and I was covering Italy and Greece and
the Vatican. And when I went to Italy, I had just lost an enormous amount of weight and
people said, "Well, how are you ever gonna keep it off if you are in Italy?" And so,
I was looking at Italy, in part, through the, through the prism of someone who's, "Ok, why
are all of these people who live in this food paradise not as fat as the average American?"
And so a chapter of the book sort of is, is me going through Italy trying to figure out
what that's about and, and I just wanted to read you a little, a little snippet from that
if I've marked it correctly. Ok, this is in terms of why aren't Italians fatter than they
are?
[reads from book]
"The answer wasn't exercise. My experience trying to find and use a proper gym, somewhere
with the full complements of weights and an attractive array of cardiovascular machines
and a setting that blunted the potential drudgery of it all, made that immediately clear. In
the center of Rome, where The Times office was located, there was nothing like a spacious
gleaming equinox where past illegitimate fitness centers were the sorts of perfunctory setups
you found in hotels. They were depressing and they weren't gonna motivate me to visit
often or linger for more than a few minutes at a time. But in a slightly less central
location, along one edge of the Villa Borghese Park, was the Roman Sport Forum or La Roman,
as people in the know called it, speaking of it as they might La Loren or La Jolie.
Romans saw it as an ostentatiously endowed diva of a gym even though it was little larger
or better outfitted than the kind of health club you find in any strip mall in any American
excerpt. It had a modest pool,--
[clears throat]
"a weight room with scores of machines, a glass walled exercise studio for calisthenics
and perhaps two dozen treadmills, Stairmasters, recumbent bikes and the like. It was darker
than any American gym I knew, making me wonder if Italians considered mood lighting a catalyst
for working out. I was thinking along the wrong lines. Working out wasn't really the
point of La Roman. In fact, the managers of La Roman seemed intent on preventing it. For
starters, there was the signed doctor's note they insisted I get in order not just to join
the gym, but even to venture as far as the locker room during an initial visit. I produced
a note, paid for a six month membership, changed into my work out clothes and found an available
treadmill. I had been on it less than five minutes when I noticed one of the gym attendants
standing at my side flapping his arms and yelling at me. "E vietato," he was saying
and I would soon realize that whether you were speaking to an attendant at La Roman
or reading one of the many signs posted on the walls, that phrase was the most prevalent
one; a kind of motto for the gym: E vietato. E vietato, translation: It's forbidden. But
precisely what about my activity on the treadmill vietato? Running? All the Italians on the
treadmills around mine were walking and they were walking rather slowly at that and nary
a pinprick of perspiration smudging their fashionable exercise outfits. My own t-shirt
was already mottled and wet. So maybe sweating was vietato.
[laughter]
"The attendant explained that while the note from my doctor entitled me to use the gym's
pool, weight machines, locker room and, of course, snack bar, it didn't entitle me to
use any cardiovascular equipment. For that, I needed to submit to an independent examination,
including a stress test with heart monitors taped to my chest, by the gym's own physician.
It would cost me a hundred dollars and an appointment wasn't available until a week
from then. I bided my time, paid my money, passed the stress test and returned to the
treadmill without incident using my gym visits to run three or so miles on a treadmill and
spend 30 to 40 minutes lifting weights. In the weight rooms were signs spelling out,
for unexplained reasons, that it was vietato to chew gum. It was vietato to leave free
weights lying around, a transgression that might require one of the half dozen attendants
to do something other than gossip with one another, haranguing unauthorized treadmill
users and unwind in the snack bar, which was a nearly full scale trattoria with seating
for dozens and a menu that included spaghetti carbonara and prosciutto e melone.
[laughter]
"My path to and from the locker rooms skirted its tables at which I'd sometimes spot at
my way out of the gym, the same La Roman staffers and members I'd spotted on my way in. It apparently
wasn't vietato for a member of La Roman to lean against or straddle a weight machine
for twenty uninterrupted minutes, monopolizing it without attempting anything more physical
than the arching of an eyebrow. La Roman members did this all the time, provided that the weight
machine in question afforded them a good view of other patrons and vice versa. Although
most of them were thin and no small number of them were gorgeous, their time a La Roman
deserved little credit for that. I was marveling one evening at their languorous, even phobic,
relationship with physical exertion when, yet again, a flapping yelling gym attendant
materialized at my side. He spoke in such rushed, histrionic Italian that I had to implore
him a half dozen times to slow down, back up, repeat himself and maybe use fewer polysyllabic
words. What exactly was il problema? He pointed to my gym shorts, then grabbed my arm and
tugged me to a sign I hadn't noticed before. It explained that it was vietato to wear shorts
that didn't adhere tightly to your legs.
[laughter]
"My shorts didn't and were thus, vietato. Trust me on this, the shorts I was wearing
were as unremarkable and unobjectionable as athletic shorts could be. They were precisely
the type of shorts: ribbed waist, drawstring, thick cotton, material reaching halfway down
the thigh that every college since the dawn of academia has printed its logo on and sold
in the student store. They weren't flamboyant shorts, they weren't tattered shorts, they
weren't skimpy shorts, they were archetypical, boring athletic shorts. Why did it matter
whether they adhered to my legs? I told the attendant in my flawed, functional Italian
that for my next visit to the gym I would get and wear shorts that were adhering or
adhesive or whatever they were supposed to be. Then I turned away from him and headed
to the next weight machine I planned to use. I felt a tug on my arm; he wouldn't let me
go. He held up an index finger in the international signal for "wait a second," and bolted away.
Within less than a minute he was back with two thick, blue rubber bands. I'd seen rubber
bands like these before; they were the kind often wrapped around the base of a head of
broccoli and maybe that's where they'd been at some point. But as he handed them to me,
I understood that where they were supposed to be now was wrapped around each two floppy
leg of my two floppy cotton gym shorts. I fingered them, looked strangely at them, looked
strangely at him trying to work some self pity and pleading into my expression and get
a pass. He didn't waver. And so I bet to his will, or rather, snapped to it and spent the
next 45 minutes stalking La Roman like a human broccoli; each thigh banded in blue.
[laughter]
"A few days later I ran into one of my few acquaintances at the gym and asked him if
he could shed some light on this floppy shorts policy. 'You can't wear floppy shorts,' he
explained, 'because if you did, other people could see up your legs to your crotch.' 'But
all they'd see,' I said, 'is my underwear.' 'You don't understand,' he said. 'The problem
the gym was having was that some people were short, loose legged shorts and not wearing
underwear.' He paused and added, 'Deliberately.'
[laughter]
"So, now I understood what was actually vietato was flashing your fellow gym users. And what
many La Roman regulars most wanted to do wasn't shoulder presses and a full half hour on the
elliptical. They wanted to pose, hence the mood lighting, preen, hence the avoidance
of perspiration and give their fellow fitness enthusiasts a gander at the family jewels.
That last impulse explained not only the policy on floppy shorts, but also a sign posted in
the men's locker room. It stressed that it was vietato to shower with the door in front
of your individual stall open."
[laughter]
Anyway, I never did quite solve the riddle fully why Italians aren't as heavy as we are,
but I think it mostly has to do with portions and it doesn't have to do with their time
at La Roman or any other Italian gym I ever encountered. I'd love to answer any questions
anybody has about food, restaurants, The New York Times, or nothing. You had one before.
[pause]
>>female audience member #1: I was wondering if you missed being able to eat for a living?
I mean, having read your book, I know that some of the food issues and obsessions that
you had, I just wondered if you missed that, like, having the excuse to eat?
>>Frank: When I was The Times' restaurant critic, I would eat out seven nights a week.
Sometimes I would eat two dinners in a row because you have so much scouting of restaurants
to do. Every restaurant that we review and give a star rating to because that rating
can have such economic consequence the loose rule of thumb is that you visit it at least
three times. Probably most of the restaurants I reviewed, I visited four times. So, yeah,
I had, I had an obligation or definitely this, this thing that kept me going out. I don't
miss it in that sense and I don't feel like I need an excuse to kind of go out or have
a great meal. I mean, it's something I, I left to my own devices; it's something I'm
gonna do anyway. And what's nice is, is not kind of having to have your schedule determined
by what the new restaurants are or what you have to visit two more times before "X" date.
I just, I find that I can, I can use restaurants more the way I want to than ever, than I was
for five and a half years. I can go back to a given restaurant and keep ordering the same
dish over and over again because I love it and that's something that when you're a critic,
you lose that opportunity. You lose the opportunity to be a regular at a restaurant, which I think
is one of the greatest joys of restaurant going; it's establishing a really nice relationship
with a favorite place and going again and again. And restaurant criticism sort of doesn't
sort of allow for that or really capture that.
[pause]
>>female audience member #2: Thanks for joining us today.
>>Frank: Thanks for having me.
>>audience member #2: So, I was curious about the, the process. So, you're told you have
to critique a certain restaurant? What do you do? Do you gather the troops and go a
few times or kind of, how do you then get to the point where you're actually writing
the review?
>>Frank: You're not really kind of told to go to a restaurant. You pretty much, you're,
you're watching the calendar of openings. Usually, it's pretty obvious what restaurants
need to be reviewed because they're the restaurants that, in if Tom Kalikio is opening a new restaurant,
the public curiosity about that is going to be intense enough that that's definitely a
restaurant you're gonna have to review. I would say two thirds of the restaurants you
review in a given year fall into that sort of "no brainer" category. When you, when you
see a restaurant opening that you, that you feel you're gonna have the need to review
and that people have a curiosity about the, wants, that the curiosity be sated fairly
quickly, you kind of look at the calendar, you say, "How, when will that restaurant have
been open about three, three and a half months?" Because you don't wanna do it right away cause
that's not really gonna be an accurate snapshot of the restaurant. You, you don't really wanna
visit in the first week or the first two weeks. Once you figure out like when it's sort of
ripe to be written about, you kind of work your way backwards and you stagger a bunch
of reservations so that on what would be the due date for your review, you'll have three
or four visits to the restaurant under your belt and you'll be able to write. You get
on the phone, you make a lot of reservations, you, you learn exactly what that restaurants
reservation policies are and you make sure to call at the earliest possible moment because
you can't afford not to get in because you need it for your job, but you're calling anonymously
so you're not pulling strings. And then you reach out to your friends and in this rubix
cube of a schedule you construct, you can decide who you invite to come with you this
time or that time. Sometimes you leave that to the last minute, but you almost always
make a reservation for four because one of the goals of repeat visits to a restaurant
is to work your way through the menu. So, if you're only going alone or with one other
person, it's very hard to order a variety of food. And then you keep track of what you
eat so when you go back a second or third time, if you've had the salmon twice or you've
had the rib eye, you don't get that again; you have a lot of very, very disappointed
friends who sit down very excited and then you tell them what they cannot order.
[laughter]
And you encounter a lot of long faces and then you hold up your credit card and say,
"Remember, I'm paying so it's not really so bad."
[laughter]
That's the process.
>>audience member #1: Thanks.
>>Frank: Sure.
>>female audience member #3: Hi. Thanks for being here.
>>Frank: Thanks for having me.
>>audience member #3: I have lots of questions, among them, can a hole in the wall restaurant
get four stars? And two, did, did you wear disguises like Mimi Sheraton? Three, what
was it like going from restaurant criticism back to real journalism? One is so subjective
and it's a different kind of writing and then to go back to digging for facts and investigating
and then to find, I, when you criti-, where you a critic for two years?
>>Frank: I was a critic for fi-, five and a quarter years; five and a half, yeah.
>>audience member #3: Five and a half, so, Google had really changed things by the time
you came back to reporting. So, what was, what was that like? That's my main question.
>>Frank: Ok, the, I'll take them in reverse order because I can remember them that way.
The "what was it like to go back to quote unquote real reporting from restaurant criticism,"
I actually don't see the things as differently as someone else might. I think where--
[clears throat]
while criticism asks you to insert, it doesn't really ask, it demands that you insert your
own opinion, I think its foundation is the gathering of information and evidence. I mean,
it's I think, the same powers of observation and analysis that you use when you write a
profile of a political figure are the ones you use when you are doing a piece of criticism.
It's just that at the end of it all and during the process of it all, you're not trying to
put your personal feelings to the side, you're actually trying to kind of almost, almost
cultivate your personal feelings. But it doesn't, it's not really, the process isn't that, isn't
really that different and I don't think the skills are that different. The Internet change
has changed restaurant criticism a lot in the sense that there's now any number of sites
that, that rely on user generated content. And so you can go to Yelp--
[clears throat]
and you can use that as your restaurant reviewing resource as opposed to The New York Times.
I think that, I think that as people get smarter, they'll see that it's not a substitute though.
We were talking about this at lunch. You don't know when you're reading, like you could be
reading ten Yelp raves for a place all ten of those may have been planted by the restaurant.
If I were opening a restaurant tomorrow, and I mean this not cynically, but seriously,
if I were opening a restaurant tomorrow, the first thing I would probably do is activate
a phone tree or Internet tree or friends and say, "Hey, will everyone like post a positive
review of this place?" So that I'm insulated from negative star ratings on, on a user generated
content site. My point is you have no idea where that stuff's coming from. You have no
idea if, even if it is a legitimate rave, if you have no idea if that person knows anything
at all about dining out, has any frame of reference, went to the restaurant more than
once, ordered more than one thing, so I think that as a lot of, as the Internet offers people
more and more places to go and get what, what seems like a kind of broader based review
of things, I think that traditional criticism's gonna be seen as more important and more reliable
than ever because it's the only place you can go and really trust that you're getting
an independent viewpoint that has no economic stake in what it's writing about and that
has a kind of broad frame of reference earned by eating out night after night after night.
There was another question. I'm, I, I forgot one of your questions. I'm sorry.
>>audience member #2: Does a hole in the wall restaurant deserve a four star rating [inaudible]
>>Frank: I think any restaurant can get a f-, can get four stars and there are very
few hole in the wall restaurants, true hole in the wall restaurants that are spending
the kind of money that you would need to spend to get the kind of ingredients that would
really earn you four stars. But, if you mean like cosmetically, can a restaurant that is
not, that, that's not draping its tables in white linen and and pulling all the bells
and whistles, can something like that get four stars? Yeah, I think so. And I think
it has happened and it will happen, but four stars is a pretty rare thing, so it doesn't
happen that often.
>>female audience member #4: Thanks for coming. One of my questions is about, it's kind of
related to what you were asking, actually, is anonymous critics versus someone who's
recognizable like you, so there was an article in The New Yorker awhile back about the Michelin
Guide and--
>>Frank: Yeah.
>>audience member #4: how it's so secretive. And I was wondering kind of what, what your
thoughts are on that and if it's more effective, less effective when it's shrouded in secrecy?
>>Frank: Right. Well, when I was, when I was a critic, I mean I, I've done a lot of TV
appearances since I handed in my, my critics pass or whatever you wanna call it metaphorically,
but when I was a critic I never let my photo be taken in real time. There were some surreptitiously
taken cell phone pictures out there. They were old pictures from book jackets in the
past. I was frequently recognized--
[clears throat]
in a city like New York or like San Francisco where you have sophisticated restaurateurs
and where the stakes are very high and a lot of money is, is on the line. You're never
gonna have a critic who operates for more than a few months before almost everybody
who wants to know what that person looked like, looks like, has figured it out. In my
first months on the job, many, many times I would be sitting in a restaurant and I would
notice, in the sort of vestibule area, like people walk in, pause, like look at me for
awhile and walk out. And I learned that what was happening was in those initial months
if a restaurateur did recognize me, he or she would literally get on the phone to like,
the neighborhood, to the restaurants nearby and say, "I've got him right here, live in
the flesh, come in, take a look." And that's what was happening.
[laughter]
Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin, told me at one point that not only did he, when
I was appointed, not only did he do what pretty much every restaurateur in Manhattan did and
like do a Google image search and see what, what could be gotten, but if he saw a reference
to me giving some commentary about the presidential election on Nightline, back in 2000, he went
to the, he went to the network and actually kind of purchased or as a favor, got the tape
because he wanted his staff not only to look at still photos of the critic, but to see
the critic gesticulating, to hear the critics voice. My point is unless you changed in in-in
cities as cut throat as New York and San Fran, unless you changed critics every four to six
months, you're never gonna have a critic that is not recognized by the restaurateur and
chefs who really want to recognize the critic. Disguises you hear a lot about because it's
great copy, it's, it's for, for a restaurant critic to come whether selling a book or just
giving a talk and-and tell tales about all the times they were disguised, it's great,
it's great material. It's not really true. It's really, really laborious to put on disguises
that are convincing to wear them, so even the restaurant critics who've become most
famous as disguising themselves, really weren't doing it that frequently. They were doing
it; it's not a lie, but it's not really, it's not, it's not the nightly MO of any restaurant
critic cause it's just too difficult. It's, it's too difficult to pull off.
>>female audience member #5: Thanks for coming. I've read your book and it's really amazing.
>>Frank: Oh, thanks.
>>audience member #5: I have two questions for you. One: what was your most memorable
experience as a restaurant critic? And two: how are you critiquing your own food?
>>Frank: You mean food I make?
>>audience member #5: Mm-hmm.
>>Frank: Well, I'm not, I'm not a very good cook so I don't, I, I'm very impatient. So
I, I don't cook all that often and when I do, I critique my food very generously.
[laughter]
But, I forgot your first question, I'm sorry.
>>audience member #5: Most memorable experience as a restaurant critic.
>>Frank: It, it's, it's eating out as much as you are, traveling as much as you get to
at times, it's really hard to say there's a most memorable experience, but I do seem
to always kind of when someone asks that question remember early, early on, in the first couple
months when I came back from Italy and I was living in New York and I was just beginning
this particular job, the restaurant critic job, I was lucky. A couple very ambitious
restaurants opened just, just as my watch was beginning, so I got to go to them frequently.
One was Per Se, which is the East Coast version of The French Laundry, one is the most expensive
restaurant in New York; it's called Masa. And it is a kind of set menu that you go and
you have for set price which is anywhere from 350 to 500 dollars based on the ingredients
at that time of year and that's without ***, water, tip, any of that. And Masa is this,
it's almost this kind of monastic space; it's very small. It's Japanese. It's mostly, the,
the kind of, the, the heart of the meal is is-is sushi that is made piece by piece for
you by a su-, a sushi chef, who's just attending only like probably you and the person next
to you and maybe one other person. Masa would open for lunch if they had a reservation.
And one day I went there for lunch and it was just me and the paper's wine critic. And
we got there and nobody else was in the entire restaurant and so Masa, himself, not one of
his, not not one of his his kind of colleagues, was the only one there and we literally ate
about a three hour meal in which every single piece of food that we consumed, we consumed
just moments after he finished assembling it in real time. And each piece of sushi he
would hand you and you would take it in your hand and there was just something so unbelievably
pampering and intimate about that that I'll never forget that meal. And having it in the
middle of the day just felt like especially decadent.
[laughter]
I mean, it was just like the height of decadence to spend that kind of money and that kind
of time in the middle of the day, I think just ramped it, I think just sent it off the charts.
>>female audience member #6: I have one simple question. What, what is your current relationship
with food?
>>Frank: I love food. My current relationship with food is not nearly as tumultuous as it
has been in the past. It's one mostly of just outright love, but I, I still find myself
still having to be very careful. I, I'm a life-long overeater who has had some periods
of very bad health because of it and that never goes away. It's interesting, if-if-if-
if-if my book fits in a genre, in any one genre, it probably more fits in, in, it's
probably better described as an addiction memoir than a food memoir in some ways. But
food is a really tricky thing. I didn't think of it this until I was fortunate enough when
I was sending around the manuscript to get a, a quote, a blurb from Augusten Burroughs,
who I don't know, but who I, who I knew some people in common and I sent him the manuscript
and what he said what we put on the cover, on the hardcover. I think it's on the inside
of this, was food was a really tricky addiction because with anything else; alcohol, crack,
***, the answer is just stop. But when you have someone who's got a food addiction
or is an overeater, you can't say, "Well, just avoid the substance entirely." So, it's
a much, much kind of subtler challenge and I think it's a challenge that never, that
never really goes away.
>>female audience member #7: Where do you look for, look to as experts when you're looking
for criticism on food now? Particularly if you're going to say, a new city, and trying
to decide where to eat while you're there. Where do you start?
>>Frank: I don't, it's interesting, I don't have a method. I mean, I, I begin with Google,
I mean as we all do when we're doing an Internet search and I say that not just cause I'm here.
But I mean I just kind of Hoover up a lot of different things and sort of. I find myself,
in an unscientific way, triangulating a lot of different things. Oddly enough, I really
don't end up looking a lot at Yelp or CitySearch or stuff like that. And it's not because of
the extreme negative view I painted a second ago. I mean, I do think all of those things
are useful if they're, if they're looked at and analyzed and in the right way and taken
with a grain of salt, but there's so much between blogs, magazines, travel guides, there's
so much writing out there that you can be going somewhere, you can do an aggressive
Internet search and if you really kind of read through everything that's coming you
start to, you start to notice points of agreement and commonality. Like, suddenly like, I mean
like, certain restaurants at every, at every kind of point in the, in the cost spectrum
will just keep coming at you again and again. And I think you begin to get a gut sense of
where it is you want and need to go. I also, though, avail myself of a kind of tool that
unfortunately everyone doesn't have, which is I know a lot of food writers, I know a
lot of people who travel a lot--
[clears throat]
and maybe haven't written up their discoveries. So I work, I send out a lot of emails to friends,
to friends whom I know that like, probably have, have been to some of the places and
so I use a lot of those informal recommendations as well.
>>female audience member #7: Thanks for coming. I really enjoyed your book.
>>Frank: Thank you.
>>audience member #6: If you had a friend coming to visit you in New York and only had
time for one meal, where would you take him or her and what dish would you get?
>>Frank: I, I can't answer that because I, I'd ask the friend a bunch of questions, you
know what I mean? Like, one meal I, I, is just, is the friend in the mood for Italian?
Does the friend, if the friends coming from Italy, I'm not gonna take him or her to an
Italian restaurant. Does the friend want a semi-formal experience? Does the friend want,
what is currently the most chattered about thing? For a while there like, the kind of
split the difference place you never, that you never kind of bombed out if you took someone
to was Momofuku Ssam Bar because it was very particular to New York, it was the subject
of a lot of chatter, it had a menu that actually had like it was very hard; you'd be hard pressed
to not find something you don't like on the menu. These days I probably wouldn't because
it's almost become a cliché. It's still a great restaurant, but I think New York has
such an incredible diversity in wealth of restaurants and everyone is looking for something
particular on a given night that I don't think you can say that there's just this one restaurant
that they have to eat at when they come to New York. I don't think you could say it for
San Fran, either. You really have to kind of find out a little bit more what someone,
someone's taste, tastes are and what their mood is on that night.
>>Male audience member #1: Thanks for coming. And I have two questions. The first one is
like after dining at one of these incredible, fascinating restaurants, like night after
night, is, is your bar for excellence or your bar for this like good food so high that it's
hard to meet every night? Like that's something that I wonder. And the second question is,
like you had, whenever you go out to these restaurants you had this card that would essentially
pay for all these meals. For someone like me, I'm currently a college student right
now, so like is there a way for me to like ostensibly like fit within a budget and still
enjoy some of the res-, some of the restaurants and some of the food that you enjoy?
>>Frank: I think we've never, the last thing first; I think, I think you've never lived
at a better time if you're, if you're, if you're on a tight budget, you're a college
student, whatever, and you wanna participate in the food culture, I don't think there's
a better moment than right now because as, as the whole white tablecloth idiom is declined,
more and more ambitious, young chefs are strutting their stuff in, in, in theaters that are not
stuffy. They don't necessarily have a rope line of a very high cost. We were talking
a moment ago about Momofuku Ssam Bar, or similarly Momofuku Ssam Noodle Bar; you can go in there
and try some of the things that people, because you're not on the hook for a three course
meal, because you're giving up certain atmospheres like a back on your seat or the ability to
make a reservation, all, all are great tradeoffs to make in return for a lower price. And,
I mean, all throughout New York there are, one of the hottest restaurants probably right
now in New York in terms of people talking about it, is a place in Little Italy, oddly
enough because that's usually not where you find real food of accomplishment, but you
find hokey stuff. But it's called Torrisi Italian Specialties. And this maybe isn't
a college budget, but what they do there it's a very no frills atmosphere, it's a set menu
for everyone, and it's--
[clears throat]
Six antipasti, a pasta, an entree and a fairly like big dessert cookie spread and some Italian
ice and all of that's for 50 dollars a person. It's a lot of food for 50 dollars and it's
being served, it's being cooked and, and, and prepared by, by two guys who have really
big ambitions, but they just want their food to be accessible. They want to work in that
format, which also kind of suits the situation if you have a lot of investment money to kind
of launch a place with a lot of bells and whistles. So, I think, as someone dining on
a low budget, you can be part of the food conversation better than ever before because
there is so much ambition and creativity on, on the lower price, in the lower price points.
In terms of am I like kind of ruined, was what your question by like having had so many
great meals, I did, I did, some of you have laptops you can look at it right now, I did
a thing called "The New York Diet, A Food Diary" for New York Magazine's food website,
Grubstreet, last week. They asked me, they've been doing a series of people; they've done
it with like Tony Bourdian, they did it with my friend Dana Cowin, who's the editor for
Food & Wine, where they just ask you to keep track of what you have eaten from a Friday
through the following Wednesday. It's really like six days. And on one of those days, I
had, I was gonna go to a barbecue place that wasn't even my favorite one, but it was just
logistically what was convenient. I got there, they're air conditioning wasn't working, they
only had one table, it was in the worst possible place and I thought, "You know what? It's
like the umpteenth 95 degree day in New York. I can't deal with it." It was 9:05, I was
cranky, I wanted a drink, I wanted food, I mean, I literally, my boyfriend and I we just
did a 360 degree look at the corner, we went into a nothing sports bar and we had burgers.
The burgers were utterly ordinary and I was totally happy because I was hungry and it
was food and I think if most of us are realistic, you can know great food and you can love great
food, but food is also just something that kind of fills you up at a moment when you
need it; when you need a cool place to sit, you need something cold to drink and you need
something in your belly and I, at least, still can be made plenty happy by, by having those
needs met without it being a two, three or four star accomplishment.
>>female audience member #8: Thanks again for coming. So, in many ways restaurants are
sort of like the ultimate start-up. There are so many that start up every single year,
very high sort of failure rating; every now and then there'll be one or two that sort
of last. Are there any lessons that you think that sort of Silicon Valley tech world can
learn from the restaurant world?
>>Frank: Wow. I don't, that's a great question, but I don't know enough about, I know nothing
about the tech world. I'm like, so I'm, so trying to draw the bridge between the two
would be kind of tough for me. I mean, I think that the one thing that I always noticed about,
about restaurants and I think this has to transfer to every endeavor in life is for,
for all the risks and for all the incidences of failure. I think when you have people of
ability and passion who really throw themselves at something in an earnest way, I think it
usually succeeds. I mean, I think you can, you can stack the deck against yourself in
ridiculous ways in restaurants as in anything else in life by kind of just making some really
dumb decisions about location, in the case of restaurants; maybe there would be a different
analogous dumb decision for, for a high tech company, but if you haven't done anything
really boneheaded and you are, and you, and you have, and you have some aptitude for what
you're doing and you're really passionate about it and you are willing to work twice
as hard as the people around you, I think almost always in those situations you find
success. I think it's really just about passion and dedication and I think that's gotta be
true of everything, not just restaurants.
>> male audience member #2: I presume you had dinner or lunch on campus. What did you
have and what did you think about it?
>>Frank: I did. Well, first of all, I think it's, I, I, I'm truly still stunned that you
can just walk around and eat anything you want for free. I mean, wow.
[Frank laughs]
I mean, if we tried that out at The New York Times for a week, I think you'd see people
leaving the building with Hefty bags of hanger steak.
[laughter]
I had hanger steak and actually I thought it was really pretty good. I mean, it was,
it was, I eat a lot of hanger steak in New York restaurants. I put it on a ciabatta roll
with some tomatoes and I ate it and it was a damned good sandwich. Yeah, I mean, I, it's
better than the Times cafeteria and ours isn't horrible. I mean, I think you guys eat well.
I'm surprised you're all this fit, but then again you got the gym, too. You got everything.
[laughter]
>>male audience member #3: I wonder if you have a comment on some of the edicts regulations
that are going on in New York--
>>Frank: Some of the what?
>>audience member #3: The edicts or regulations; no trans fat, no salt, the blah limitation.
>>Frank: I have to be careful about that because that's the kind of thing I could end up writing
about and, and, and it's the kind of thing like, we all have our personal opinions.
[clears throat]
I think I actually kind of have to avoid that question because I think it's the kind of
thing I could too easily end up writing about and I would want writing about it to present
all sides of it and not to have someone say, "No, but we saw you at Google on something
that went out on YouTube saying X, Y or Z." So, I, I'm gonna have to muzzle myself on
that one. I'm sorry. It's a very good question. I mean, and it's, and it's a big, no it's
a big, I, I can say this, I think we're gonna see a lot, I think it's gonna be, I think
we're gonna see a lot of public activism and a lot of public debate about this. I mean,
there's a lot of chatter about soda taxes I think in the same way that there are, hey--
[laughter]
I love dogs.
[laughter]
I think in the same way that there are sin taxes on cigarettes and alcohol; I think we're
gonna see more and more discussion of instituting similar things when it comes to foods that
are not good for us. But I think we're also gonna and I'm just kind of like predicting
the debate. I think there's also gonna be a lot of debate about who those taxes fall
on and whether it's quite fair as a matter of kind of, whether it's just kind of fair
to kind of have the people paying those taxes who may be paying them in greater measure,
whether the people can afford to pay them.
>>male audience member #4: So, kind of the opposite of the tone of some of the other
questions, I, I kind of wonder how you got through five years of that much eating?
[audience member laughs]
I'm going to New York--
>>Frank: You mean psychologically, physically, spiritually?
>>audience member #4: Yeah, psychologically. It seems great restaurants are wonderful things,
but trans-, transpose it to a different world, I wouldn't want to go to the opera every night.
>>Frank: Right, no, yeah.
>>audience member #4: And you kinda did that for--
>>Frank: No, that is a great question. It, it's a weird question to answer because when
you, the question presumes that it would be hardship to have that kind of expense account
and, and charge, professional charge, to eat out every night. But yes, there are many nights
when you really, really don't wanna eat out. There are many nights that when, because of
the reservation's you've set up, you're on the hook for a four hour meal at a fancy schmancy
French place and what you really want is a burger. And that's tough because you've made
your plan. What, what you have to keep reminding yourself is, among all of those things that
we have to do for work, this is a pretty like not onerous one.
[laughter]
No, I mean really, you have to say like in a work, by its definition, is something you
have to do. And of all the things that people suck up in the service of work, having to
suck up a 250 dollar person, five course, three hour meal is not really, is not such
a horrible thing. So, you have to remember that and the other thing is I would try really
hard to just, in the beginning I made the mistake often of trying to kind of spread
the wealth of these places at the table and make sure to invite this person who worked
over in that cubicle X number of times, and I kinda tried to be a really, I don't know
what the word is, but I, I was very conscious about like about, about, about that sort of
like, an etiquette I was inventing and forcing on myself. As time went on I realized that
if you have to be out at a restaurant every night as a matter of work, you really need
to make it as comfortable for yourself as possible. So, my universe of diners kept shrinking
and I would dine with the same people over, I mean the same group of like, say 40, over
and over again because I found that if I wasn't just totally comfortable at the table, if
I wasn't in a situation where I didn't feel like I had to kind of be the song and dance
host, that, that sort of extra social pressure of entertaining people, for me, was like the
tipping point when I didn't feel like being out that made it really an unpleasant experience.
So, I kind of made sure to make it as pleasant for myself as possible. Hey.
>>male audience member #5: So, New York and San Fran both have a pretty strong kind of
grassroots food and events, so for example, this past weekend we had like an underground
market in, in San Fran where it's kind of like amateur cooks or people who are kind
of like Internet business, like one or two people. I was wondering, I've noticed that
there've been some articles in The Times sort of covering like, for example, the ice cream,
the artisan ice cream trucks that go around there. I was wondering like at what point
do these kinds of, these, these like kind of small, grassroots chefs, when do they get
on the radar of something like The Times?
>>Frank: I think--
>>audience member #5: Yeah, go ahead.
>>Frank: Oh, no go.
>>audience member #5: And then the second part would be as a critic, cause you, maybe
you're used to the more traditional like kind of restaurant model, these things like the
carts and kind of these street food events, how do you sort of recalibrate your reviews
for something like that?
>>Frank: Things like artisanal dessert trucks, stuff like that, they get on the radar of
something like The Times, they get on everyone's radar really fast because of the Internet,
which is a great thing. I mean, so we tend to notice them, I mean even though we, as
Times employees, can only have so many eyes on so many different things in a city as large
as New York, the fact that there are so many food bloggers, there are so many different
corners of the Internet where people are writing about this stuff; it's pretty easy, actually.
It's easier than ever to be a reporter of certain sorts of social and lifestyle trends
these days because anybody out there with a blog and a, and a computer and a keyboard
is sort of acting as, as, sort of your advanced troops and your scouts. So those things, I
think, get noticed really, really quickly. In terms of how they affect reviewing, I don't,
I don't, I think its, its apples and oranges. We, we write a lot of article at The Times
where we kind of round up some of those things that you're talking about, whether it's like
artisanal shaved ice, which there was a big article my friend, Julia, did awhile ago,
and, and within those articles there is plenty of commentary on what seems to be best or
not. Those things don't need to be and probably shouldn't be moved into the restaurant space
because they're not, they're not restaurants. I mean, there's a kind of necessary definition
of parameters in the restaurant review space and while it has, while those parameters have
grown broader and looser over time, if you go back long ago, if it wasn't a proper restaurant
with a tablecloth and all that, it was unlikely to get reviewed. I think we do rightly draw
the line when it's something like a truck. You can't really give stars to a truck. I
mean, and, and nor is there as much of an imperative or as much importance in doing
so because if you think about it, what you're doing with the, with the restaurant space
is you're, you're telling people at the end of the day the one thing you're doing is you're
telling people whether to go or not. And so, you should reserve that space and that command
for something that, that asks a certain level of financial commitment from them that's more
than the dollar 99 they're spending for a cup of ice. And I think that's one way to
think of what belongs inside and outside.
>>audience member #5: Thanks.
>>Frank: Sure.
>>female audience member #9: You mentioned earlier that you don't love to cook and I
know you come from more of a journalist background. So, so you think to be a successful restaurant
critic you need kind of the training and the professional restaurant experience to be able
to really speak to the technique of the best crème brulee you've ever had or not?
>>Frank: Well, I mean, there's, that's a good question. There's a lot of different opinions
on that. I think you can, I don't think you need to be able to make a great crème, crème
brulee in order to judge a great crème brulee. And what's really interesting is, for some
reason, it often gets hashed out, not just in regard to me, but in general cause most,
most restaurant critics aren't extraordinary accomplished cooks. Most of them do, probably
cook more than I ever did or do, but there's this discussion of like if you haven't worked
in a restaurant or if you haven't gone to a culinary academy, do you have any right
reviewing restaurants? Well, I don't know of many movie critics who've been to film
school or ever stepped behind a camera or even been on a film set. I don't know of any,
most book critics haven't written books and that's not such a kind of rarified thing to
do. I think that to be a critic of whatever you're criticizing, the one thing you need
is to have really, really exposed yourself to the broadest possible world of experience
in that thing. You need to know, you need to know what greatness is when you see it
and you need to know when something falls short and the best way to know that is to
have had such a wealth of experiences; to have a kind of yardstick that is so much more
finely calibrated and so much longer than other peoples, that when you say this is the
best short rib entre in the city, you know what you're talking about because you've tried
almost all of them. I don't think you need to be able to go home and make it. And I think
you can also, I mean, I find when I do, when I do take stabs at cooking, I mean I'm exaggerating
my incompetence, but I can look at a recipe in a cookbook and I can make little tweaks
and end up liking it a lot better because I do know a lot about how flavors work together
and I do know like, what's going to be an engine of moistness and what's gonna be the
opposite. I just don't, I'm just an impatient person when it comes to the time and, and
patience necessary to kind of put together a great meal. It usually ends up watching
something I DVR'd instead on the TV or something.
>>audience member #9: Great. And then my second question is, in terms of kind of a celebrity
chef movement and the new attention that we're getting with Top Chef and all these shows,
do you think that that's a positive influence on the restaurant or culinary world or is
it detracting from the genuine nature of it?
>>Frank: I think it's both. I think that one, on the po-, in, in a positive sense what Top
Chef and a lot of those shows have done is they've, they've gotten more people interested
in food and in restaurants than formerly were. And that's a kind of market that then exists
that allows a lot more chefs to take economic risks, to open places, to, to try things out
because they've got a more willing and rapt audience than they've ever had before so that's
really, really positive. I think on the negative side, the, the kind of commercialization of
food entertainment has sent a message to a lot of young chefs to be that they are, that
what they're after and what this world promises them is fame and riches and, and they're faces
on billboards. And that actually is only gonna happen for a very few people and so, I think
the, the danger and the negative part is that some of the wrong people will be attracted
for the wrong reasons to the hard, hard, hard work, of-of-of cooking in a restaurant because
they have some misguided illusion that what this really is is a fast track to being the
next Snooky.
[laughter]
No, I mean really, we live in a world where everyone wants to be some version, high or
low, of Snooky, and food seems to be a bridge. I'm serious.
[Frank laughs]
And I think, and so I think that's the dark side of the--
>>audience member #9: Ok, great. Thanks so much.
>>Frank: Sure.
>>female audience member #10: Hi. I was wondering what was the reason for the change of your
subtitle for your book from the hardcover to the soft cover? And also, I was wondering,
in your book you talk about your relationship with food and how portion control was the
most important thing. And I was just wondering, psychologically, what was the most important
part about getting the, kind of keeping the--
>>Frank: Ok. The subtitle changed for two reasons. One was, the previous subtitle was
"The Secret History of a Full Time Eater," I think that's right, the full time eater
reference was a double entendre, it, it, it referred to just how much time in my life
I spent eating, but it also referred to full time eater as in like, restaurant critic.
With the soft cover coming out pretty much 11, 12 months after I left that job, that
sort of phrase had less relevance. And then the other reason was when I and the publisher
got feedback about the book, whether it was kind of anecdotal or whether it was reviews
and I was really, really lucky to get great reviews, almost everybody keyed in as, on,
on family stories and on the kind of family members whose portraits I painted in the book
as their favorite part of it. And so we thought why not just adjust the subtitle so it's clear
that this isn't, this isn't just or even primarily inside tales of a restaurant critic book,
but it's really a, a full-bodied family memoir. And so, I don't know, I don't know if you've
looked at it or read it, but I mean--
>>audience member #10: I read the hardcover. Are they different?
>>Frank: No, no, they're exactly the same, but I mean, I know if you read it I mean there's
a very detailed portrait of my grandmother who is in a lot of the book, a lot of the
book is about my mother. We want to make sure that, that stuff was very dear to me and very
dear to us and we wanted to make sure that didn't get lost and we thought maybe the first
subtitle had given short shrift to that. In terms of the most important thing about portion
control, well, one, one thing that I think is, is really helpful, was helpful to me and
I think would be helpful to a lot of people is if you are obsessed with food and I think
this would probably be true if you're obsessed with anything, to channel that obsession in
a healthier direction. I don't think you have to necessarily get rid of the obsession, you
can rechannel it and I, over time, and especially when I moved to Italy and then even more especially
when I became a restaurant critic, began to be increasingly obsessed with quality as opposed
to quantity. And that was a kind of psychological alteration or trick that helped me a lot.
And I also just kind of, you know I spent a lot of time when I, when I have the kind
of impulse to be as bad with food as I was in the past, I spend a lot of time just kind
of, just kind of pausing and reminding myself of how unhappy I was and how self-destructive
I was and just sort of literally like kind of stopping and flashing back and meditating
for a second before I pick up the pint of ice cream. I think, I think you just kind
of have to do that hard mental work all the time.
>> male audience member #6: So I was wondering if you could go a little bit more into the
writing process that you employed when writing the reviews. Is it something that after you
go to a restaurant you would stay up for an hour later and write down your notes? Or when
would you finally crystallize your, your opinion of that night's meal?
>>Frank:
[clears throat]
I would do a lot of different things. It wasn't always the same, but some of the things I
did most frequently, I learned over time that I did like to have some sort of contemporaneous
notes, but it's impossible to take notes at a table without drawing attention to yourself
and I tried texting myself, but that also just kind of goes on a little bit too long,
so I would, I would either step outside as if I were going to have a cigarette or I'd
go to the men's room and I would call myself. And I would either call my work machine or
my home machine and I would essentially dictate, because you can talk so much faster than you
can write. I would dictate things that were coming into my head or descriptions of dishes
or reactions I was having. And that way I also knew that if I got home at 11:30 and
as part of the meal I had three glasses of wine and I really just wanted to go to bed,
I didn't have to worry always about writing things down because they were waiting, they
were waiting for me to be transcribed on my voicemail. And the only, and I think it's
a great system, the only danger is occasionally if you're just a little bit sloppy as you're
cleaning out your voicemail, you ruin a whole night's notes. Like, you hit the three instead
of the two and you're like, "Oh, there they go." Luckily, it didn't happen very often,
but and the sometimes I would get, I would go home and if I was still kind of alert,
I always for every restaurant I was reviewing, I had a file in my computer that I would just
keep adding to. Cause I mean, sometimes you have a thought three days after the meal.
Just call up the file and add to it and those files would usually grow over the course of
the five weeks you're visiting the restaurant. And then when, when it was time to write,
you kind of read through them and that was that. You seldom decide what a restaurants
rating was gonna be or what the review was gonna say until you finished your visits cause
it could really change over time. I mean, you can really, you can go to a restaurant
one night, just happen across the very, very worst quadrant of the menu. It could be the
restaurant's most off night and after three more visits you can realize, "Wow, I love
this restaurant," and that was a truly, truly abhorrent experience that needs, that needs
like the Russian judges score of the gymnasts and needs to be thrown out cause it's the
one that's, the one that's the farthest afield from everything else. But, yeah, that was
basically the process. I should probably just, we're almost at two o'clock so I should probably
just take one more question. Thank you, everybody, for coming.
>>male audience member #7: An easy one for you that you can answer, I'm quite sure. What's
the most common mistake that you've seen restaurants make?
>>Frank: I believe the most common mistake that restaurants make is, is their, is their
immediate public face to the world, whether it be on the phone or at the door. I mean,
I think that, I always grew up, my father used to always say, "First impressions are,
are vitally important because like, you'll never, you only get one crack at it and you
kind of are always trying to overcome it if it's a bad one." I'm shocked at the number
of restaurants that don't train or manage their staff in a way that has them be more
polished and friendly on the phone and I'm shocked at the number of restaurants which
don't have a system in place so that when you walk in and are standing in front of the
host or hostess station, your, your first experience is a positive one. I mean, I, I
look around at restaurants at the number of times you see an arriving party stand there,
kind of almost clamoring for attention for ten minutes before anybody gets to them. I
can't, it seems to me like such an easy thing not to do wrong, but I can't believe how many
restaurants do that wrong. But I think the great ones don't do it wrong because that's,
because they know how important it is and they know that it's an utterly controllable
situation.
>>Cynthia: Thank you again, Frank, for coming today.
>>Frank: Thank you, Cynthia.
>>Cynthia: We really enjoyed the talk and again the books are available for sale at
the back. Thank you.
>>Frank: Thanks.
[applause]