Omnivore Atlanta

Anyone who has spent significant time struggling with weight will tell you how pervasive and frustrating that internal voice can be. The voice that tells you you’re ugly. The voice that chastises you for enjoying food. The voice that congratulates you for abstaining, that picks apart every culinary decision, that fixates on clothing sizes, that wears you down until you hate yourself for being so predictably sado-masochistic.

It’s this voice we become privy to in Frank Bruni’s new memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full Time Eater. Bruni, who has spent the last four years as restaurant critic for the New York Times, has written a book that chronicles in detail his lifelong tussle with his weight. Bruni recounts every self-doubting thought, every fluctuation in pants size, and the tortured conflict of emotions surrounding every mouthful of food.

In many ways, it’s a powerful story, highly relatable and familiar to many of us. But the book belabors in 368 pages what we know in the first few chapters – this man has a fraught relationship with food and self-image. The meticulous detailing of that relationship seems self-indulgent at best, at worst an unhealthy excuse to feed his neuroses.
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Outgoing New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni gives Eleven Madison Park four stars. He philosophises a bit more losely about the descision on his blog as well.

Read the transcript or listen to the podcast of yesterday’s “Talk of the Nation” from NPR, where Phil Vittel, the Chicago Tribune’s dining critic talks about irritating menu phrases.

The AJC’s John Kessler reports on a conference call with “Top Chef” judges Toby Young and Gail Simmons.

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Frank Bruni took a tour of New York pizza in yesterday’s New York Times. His summary is elegant if not surprising. (What isn’t about balance?):

A great pizza and great pasta are kinfolk. What’s a margherita, after all, but a canvas for tomato, cheese and herb with less slickness, more crunch and more portability than noodles? Many of the flavors are the same.

And be it salad, pasta or pizza, the surest element of success is balance. For pizza that means crispness shouldn’t come at the expense of tenderness, the crust can’t steal the thunder from the toppings, and toppings can’t run roughshod over the crust.

As for toppings, they should add a whisper of sweetness or murmur of heat to the milky, tangy, wonderful white noise of cheese. All of the pizza places in my list of new-generation favorites understand this. And almost all of my favorite pies exemplify it.

Bruni’s general experience seemed to be that nothing is very predictable. The same restaurant may produce pizzas of significantly varying quality. He uses Atlanta pizza-eaters favorite word, “char” (or a derivative thereof), four times in his article but also notes that a beautiful char can grace an insipid pizza.

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Frank Bruni just put up his first blog post since yesterday’s announcement that he’s leaving the job as restaurant critic for the New York Times. In it, he describes the well funded and well respected status he’s enjoyed from his employers. Aw.

If you’ve missed it, the food world has gone totally rabid with the news of Bruni’s job change. Eat Me Daily has a good roundup of Eater’s excellent coverage of what they’re calling Bruniocalypse.

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Frank Bruni is quitting the dining critic’s job at the New York Times and moving to the newspaper’s Sunday magazine to work a broader beat.

Now is the time for Bill Addison, who moved from Creative Loafing to the San Francisco Chronicle to the Dallas Morning News to Atlanta Magazine in a few years, to dial up Bill Keller, the Times‘ editor: “Yo, Bill, it’s Bill. I’m there.”

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Usually I fall hungrily on the New York Times restaurant review the day it comes out — I can’t say that about many reviews from other cities, but Frank Bruni is one of my favorite critics, and New York is a city I lived in and still eat in a few times a year. I like to keep up.

But this week, returning to work after a vacation, I was too busy and too jetlagged to bother looking at the food section online the day it came out. And now, here I am late Sunday night, finding that Bruni reviewed the Oak Room this week, where our own Joel Antunes absconded to. I am sadly behind, obviously. But if you haven’t seen the review, allow me one tiny spoiler: Ouch.

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If you haven’t heard, our economy is tanking and among those who are feeling the pinch big-time are restaurants, especially the more expensive ones. Opening my e-mail the last few days, I thought maybe I should write a post about the enormous glut of special, reduced-price, extra-indulgent Valentine’s Day menus, but I don’t have three days to record all of them.

These are an annual offer, but not typically of this year’s profuse and generous degree. And these follow the increasing number of incentives restaurants are offering routinely.

As it happens the New York Times‘ Frank Bruni wrote about the effect of the recession on restaurants a few days ago. His “Diner’s Journal” opens with this:

Has a restaurant hugged you lately?

Has it insisted that you can have it more cheaply than you thought possible and whenever you want, not just at 5:45 p.m., when your desire isn’t close to peaking, or at 9:30, when you almost can’t be bothered anymore?

Has it dropped its usual guard? Surrendered its typical reserve?

Yes, yes and yes. The only restaurants where I’ve had difficulty getting a table are Flip and the Original El Taco, neither of which take reservations. But I can’t think of a single other restaurant where I haven’t been able to reserve a table at the last minute or simply walk in. And, yes, I’ve noticed how staffs rush to tables to bathe the feet of diners and how perkiness has become epidemic among front desk folks.

But I have disconcerting news. Bruni’s piece mentions two NY dining-scene stars who have opened restaurants here recently. Both have begun offering super specials in Manhattan. One is Tom Colicchio, who has opened a Craft and Craft Bar here:

Craft, which in October opened its private room twice a month for 10-course, $150 dinners cooked by Tom Colicchio — called Tom: Tuesday Dinner — reached out in the other direction, to bargain hunters, last month. It opened that room once a week for Damon: Frugal Fridays, with a range of dishes cooked by Craft’s executive chef, Damon Wise, for $10 apiece.

The other is Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who has opened Spice Market and Spice here:

Mr. Vongerichten, many of whose restaurants have always offered price reductions at lunch, is being particularly aggressive (by which I mean huggy). In October Perry St. instituted the option of a $35 three-course dinner menu during the slow hours of 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 to 11 p.m. In December, his restaurant Nougatine, a casual adjunct of his Columbus Circle flagship, Jean Georges, instituted its own $35 three-course menu, every night but Saturday from 5:30 to 6:30 and 10 to 11 p.m.

That same month he began to offer a $35 seven-course omakase dinner at Matsugen, of which he is a principal owner. There are no restrictions on the hours when it can be ordered.

Ahem! Unless things have changed recently, neither restaurateur is offering comparable bargains here in Atlanta.

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This week, restaurant critic for the New York Times Frank Bruni answered reader questions, covering topics from noise levels in restaurants to his review practices. You can read the exhaustive, 15-page Q&A here.

Incidentally, Cliff and I are always happy to answer questions from readers as well – just send us an email at foodanddrink@creativeloafing.com, and we’ll print the answer on this blog.

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In this week’s review of Sushi House Hayakawa, I made a point about how different customers can create different dining experiences. This was especially apparent on my Saturday night visit to Hayakawa. A bunch of diners who rarely frequent Buford Highway (my assumption, not a fact) were there, probably in part because of the restaurant’s inclusion in Christiane Lauterbach’s Top 15 Best New Restaurants feature in Atlanta Magazine. But it felt weird, like some breach had been made – those of us who spend a lot of time eating on Buford Highway are used to it being a safe haven from the trend-seeking mobs you might find in Buckhead or Midtown.

After I finished writing the review, I came across this post on Frank Bruni’s New York Times blog about how other customers can ruin a perfectly good dining experience. He then goes on to wonder how much influence customers have over the food, not just the atmosphere. In Atlanta, the real or perceived limitations of customers’ palates has influenced the ambitions of kitchens for years. But that seems to be changing. In my Holeman and Finch review, I made the point that our best new restaurants have totally disregarded the idea that customers can’t handle interesting or daring food. But that doesn’t mean customers don’t drive change – Beleza changed its menu after opening to deal with customer expectations regarding price and serving size.

Still, for me, the greatest impact customers can have is on other diners and the vibe of a restaurant. There are places I simply won’t go because I’m sure the customers there will drive me batty. Sometimes, I find myself somewhere for work and look around the room, and ask myself “what am I doing here? How did my life come to this place where I’m spending time surrounded by these people?”

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