As chief restaurant critic for The New York Times, Frank Bruni ate out seven nights a week in some of the best restaurants in the world and consumed vast amounts of decadent, ultra-rich food.
It sounds like a dream gig to many people, full of elegant evenings and endless courses. But for someone with serious food issues – and Bruni has had them all, from childhood bulimia to bouts with diet pills, fad diets, sleep eating and fasting – it was a disaster waiting to happen.
After five years on the job, Bruni has just hung up his critic's hat to promote his warm, funny new memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater. In it, he details his path from “baby bulimic” to professional gourmand and credits his time in Italy, where he lived from mid-2002 to early 2004, with changing his relationship with food for the better.
Now claiming to be at his healthiest ever, Bruni spoke to Globe Style on the phone from New York.
You write in Born Round that you're healthier than ever. How did you achieve this while basically living in restaurants?
I did permit myself with a kind of watchful rhythm to have meals that were enormous. I just tried to make sure that those were staggered [and] that I answered them with an extra amount of exercise.
Did your own complicated food history inform the way you wrote about restaurants?
It did actually. I did have a conscious desire not to use words like “sinful” or “guilty pleasure” [in my reviews]. But I also wrote in a way that [didn't] give gluttony a bad name in part because I'm still a glutton. You'll find the word “glutton” in my reviews, you'll probably find “hedonist” and you'll probably find “decadent.” I salute, endorse and love those words and concepts.
Do you cook?
I have never been a good cook because I'm an easily distracted and impatient person. The last time I had a dinner party, I actually started a small fire.
There are activities in life that one brings great focus to and there are some that one doesn't, but I am absolutely resolved now that I'm going to have the time at night to try and become a better cook.
You lived for a time in Italy, which is known as an eater's paradise. Was that difficult for you?
Moving to Italy at the exact moment I did was, I think, an incredibly fortunate thing because I had just struggled back from something like 75 excess pounds and, when I went to Italy, all around me I saw examples of a healthy relationship with eating. Italians exalt the quality of food instead of the quantity of food.
How did that experience prepare you for becoming the Times restaurant critic?
The quality of Italian food is so high that it gives a kind of food obsessive like me a whole different thing to focus on and that was really good training to become a restaurant critic because that was when I began to be obsessive about food in an entirely different way. I began to focus on, Had I tried this? Had I gone there? What did I think of this store's mozzarella versus that store's mozzarella? It enabled me to be fully engaged in food in way that wasn't just about shovelling great quantities of it into my mouth.
What have your food experiences in Canada been like?
When I was living in Detroit, I would probably drive to Toronto at least once every nine months. The Detroit area is not a great place to find a lot of Asian, so ... I would go to Toronto to seek out the kind of Asian food I had trouble finding in Detroit. If you had told me at the time that I would become a restaurant critic, I would have laughed. I wasn't that deliberate about the food. It was just, “Oh, I'm in Toronto. I hear they've got great Asian food, so let's do it.”
