Should the Star Ratings Take Price Into Account?

At the bottom of every New York Times restaurant review is this blurb, essentially unchanged for many years:

Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.

The paper never explains exactly how price is “taken into consideration.” Presumably, it means that a restaurant could receive a bonus star for being an exceptionally good value, or be docked a star for being too expensive.

I’d like to challenge that. Should the rating be price-sensitive? I can state at least four good reasons why not.

1. It is Open To Manipulation. In many notable cases, restaurants have raised their prices—sometimes substantially—just after they received a glowing New York Times review. For instance, when Frank Bruni awarded four stars to Eleven Madison Park, the prix fixe was $88; a year later, it is $125. Sam Sifton awarded four stars to Del Posto just a month ago; now, they have dropped their à la carte option, locking customers into a (minimum) $95 prix fixe.

I am not suggesting that either restaurant would lose the fourth star if the critic went back today, but these are hardly isolated examples. Country raised its prix fixe from $85 to $110 after Bruni gave it three stars. Fiamma went from $75 to $95 (later partly rolled back after Bruni called them on it). At Falai, a two-star restaurant, Bruni likewise saw a noticeable price increase (beyond the rate of inflation) when he returned two years later. In a blog post, he surveyed several other examples.

Now, I do realize that anything can change at a restaurant. But a talented chef is probably going to stay talented; an attractive dining room is probably going to remain that way. Prices, on the other hand, are merely the function of what a manager types into a word processor.

2. It Depends on Factors the Critic Can’t See. According to Joe Bastianich (partner with Mario Batali at Del Posto and many other restaurants), food is only 30 percent of the price—the rest being rent, labor, miscellany, and of course profit. The critic can see the food on the plate. He generally has no idea if the restauranteur got a sweet rent deal that enables him to undersell comparable restaurants. The restaurant might be saddled with union labor, which tacks on added costs. Restaurants that are part of larger empires might have the flexibility to run at a loss for a while, an option that independent outfits don’t have. Restaurants in hotels might be subsidized.

Lower rents, of course, are the reason why the dining scene has flourished in neighborhoods not formerly known for fine dining, like the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Brooklyn. (The same was true twenty-five years ago in Tribeca, but it clearly isn’t now.) But those chefs don’t deserve bonus stars, just because they choose to locate in a low-rent district. Critics review restaurants, not rent deals.

3. It Makes Comparisons Much More Difficult. It is already hard enough to discern whether a pair of two-star restaurants are really comparable, when one four-tiered system needs to accommodate every genre and cuisine. But it only adds to the confusion when there is a mysterious price element in the mix. Is the two-star Torrisi Italian Specialties really punching at the same weight as fellow Italian two-stars Maialino and A Voce Columbus? Or is Torrisi getting a bonus for serving a bounty of pretty good food for just $50? It’s quite a bit less than you would pay at the other two places, but is it actually as good in the absolute sense?

4. Critics Should Evaluate Quality, Full Stop. Think about the other disciplines in which The Times employs critics: music, dance, film, theater, books, fashion, architecture. In no other, does the price of the product figure in the review. A critic gives an informed reaction to the product, independent of its economics. The Times doesn’t give better reviews to plays that open in cheaper off-Broadway houses; it reviews the production, not its price.

I am not suggesting that diners don’t, or shouldn’t, care what the meal costs. Of course we do. But value from the customer’s perspective depends on factors the critic can’t easily assess. For all of the above reasons, I think The Times ratings should be based on quality, full stop. The reviews, of course, would still show price ranges (as they do now). Diners can decide for themselves if the restaurant is “worth it.”

Sam Sifton Awards Four Stars to Del Posto, but Can I Trust Him?

In tomorrow morning’s Times, Sam Sifton awards four stars to Del Posto, the Batali–Bastianich Italian fine dining temple in Southwest Chelsea.

The review accomplishes one thing: it sounds extraordinary—exactly what a four-star restaurant is supposed to be:

Mr. Ladner’s pastas are insanely good. After a wintry appetizer of warm, soft cotechino in a lentil vinaigrette, his spaghetti with Dungeness crab, sliced jalapeño and minced scallion arrives like the sun. It is a dish that speaks directly to Mr. Ladner’s genius, to a view of Italian cooking that allows for both jalapeño and Dungeness crab. His cooking is not about recreating Italy on a luxe scale so much as it is about recreating the Italian spirit on the grandest scale imaginable.

The problem is that four-star reviews gain value from the company they keep. There are six other four-star restaurants in New York: Daniel, Eleven Madison Park, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin, Masa, and Per Se. I know of no other critic—amateur or professional—who has suggested that Del Posto is on their level.

To the best of my recollection, each of the last three restaurants to receive four stars—Per Se, Masa, and Eleven Madison Park—had received a considerable amount of critical acclaim, blogger and food-board love, before Frank Bruni confirmed what all of us, basically, already knew. This review comes out of nowhere.

I am not saying it couldn’t be true, only that it lacks the usual indicia of truthyness.

Sifton has not had much opportunity to file high-end reviews. That’s not his fault: in the haze of the post-Lehman Brothers, post-Bear Stearns era, new restaurants of that caliber are a bit thin on the ground. Of the opportunities afforded him, he got it fairly close to right with Marea (three stars), but whiffed on Colicchio & Sons (vastly overrated at three) and SHO Shaun Hergatt (the opposite, with two).

Restaurants change. My 2½-star meal four years ago is, I admit, dated. But I am not yet ready to invest in another meal there on Sifton’s say-so. One thing this review will surely do, is whip up more attention for Del Posto. If a few more reviews confirm Sifton’s assessment, I’ll give it a try.

Not About the Food?

I’d like to deconstruct and debunk a sentence from Sam Sifton’s blog post about this week’s restaurant review, Kenmare. It’s a small point, but that’s why we’re here, so be forewarned.

Here is what Sifton said, with the offending sentence in bold.

I don’t like it much as a restaurant, but that may hardly matter. Places like Kenmare aren’t really about the food. They’re about who’s there and whether they know you. It’s a big city. That works for some people.

“Not about the food” is a lazy meme often trotted out by foodies, food writers, and food-boardists. The restaurants tagged with that epithet are usually those: A) Where the food isn’t very good; and B) That attract a “scene” (models, celebrities, nightclubbers), consisting of people that are somehow determined not to care what they’re eating.

I’d like to challenge that.

In the first place, I think there are very few places that actually set out to serve “inconsequential” food (Sifton’s word). Joey Campanaro, the named chef at Kenmare, has seven New York Times stars to his credit, including a couple of deuces at places where he is still on duty, the justly acclaimed Little Owl and Market Table. I doubt that they would have hired him if they didn’t want a bit of his pixie dust, and I doubt that he would have signed on if knew the food was doomed to be panned—as it has been.

If Kenmare is serving bad food, it’s not by design. Cooking, like books, plays, albums, paintings, and every other kind of creative endeavour, fails sometimes. But rarely is it because the creators never actually cared whether they succeeded.

A commenter to Sifton’s blog post put Pulino’s in the same category, i.e., “not about the food.” But the same owner’s Minetta Tavern has three Times stars and a Michelin star. It throbs with celebrities and pretty young things. Did Keith McNally intend for Pulino’s to be bad (assuming that’s true)? Of course not!

Now, you might argue that regardless of the owner’s intentions, restaurants can be characterized by what their customers intend. But how, exactly, do you put all of Kenmare’s customers into the same bucket? Surely it has (or had) patrons like me, who had enjoyed Joey Campanaro’s work at other restaurants, and wanted to see if he could perform the same magic in another setting.

Visit Sifton’s review, and at the top of it you’ll find a photo of six young, attractive women sitting at a table with drinks, and no food. The caption says, “Kenmare’s owners say it is not a nightclub, but not everyone is going there to eat.”

The women, no doubt, have less experience than Sifton—in the food department, I mean. But who’s to say that, because they are young and attractive, they do not care if they’re served terrible food. (I am assuming the photographer caught them before the food arrived, not that they didn’t order any.) The Times has no idea whether these women ever returned to Kenmare. It just assumes that because of what they look like, they couldn’t possibly tell a good restaurant from a terrible one.

Am I the only one offended by the suggestion?

A couple of Sifton’s other examples—Carmine’s, which has just closed after 107 years at the South Street Seaport; and Nello’s, which received a New York Times goose egg several months ago—seem to me entirely different kinds of places than Kenmare. These are old established restaurants that, for good or ill, have a clientele built up over years or decades that likes what they’re doing, and doesn’t see any need for change.

But Kenmare, a brand spanking new place with a well known chef, has no regulars to fall back on, and the so-called “scene”—those who visit places simply because someone told them to—have a predictable habit of moving on after a few months, or a year at the most. No sensible operator would open such a place intending to serve bad food. That it happens is simply because restaurants fail sometimes.

Josh Ozersky Still Doesn’t Get It

Last week, Josh Ozersky published an article on Time.com, Great Wedding Food: Tips from a Newly Married Critic.

The premise of the article is that, in lieu of traditional catering—which he says is almost always terrible—you should arrange for local chefs to each bring one dish:

That was my thought, and I put it into action with immense success. I cherry-picked my favorite dishes from half a dozen restaurants. . . .

Everybody got to do their best work, nobody was forced to carry the whole load, and since all the contributing chefs were invited to the wedding, they got to feel a well-earned pride at seeing their peers ravenously tear apart the dishes they (or in most cases, their underlings) had so carefully constructed. Out of so much destruction, my bride and I created the happiest possible memory, and all the guests got to eat their fill at the greatest wedding banquet ever thrown.

So here’s my advice to anyone who is starting to plan a wedding: Forget the caterer! Plug directly into the source of your hometown’s culinary delights, and happiness, enduring and radiant, will immediately follow.

The article went largely unnoticed until Village Voice restaurant critic wrote a blistering indictment, criticizing Ozersky for failing to disclose whether he paid fair market value for all that food.

Nobody who knows Ozersky would have any doubt. Of course he didn’t pay. In fact, unbeknownst to Sietsema, Ozersky didn’t pay for the space, either. The rooftop at the Empire Hotel came gratis, courtesy of restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow.

After The New York Times called attention to it, Ozersky posted a clarification to the original article. Time.com released a statement, in which it said that Ozersky should have disclosed the circumstances.

Ozersky says that the chefs cooked his wedding banquet in lieu of gifts, but concedes that it was “dumb of me not to be more explicit about the fact that I did not pay for any of their delicious contributions, and I was wrong not to make this clear to my editor beforehand.”

The apology is fine, as far as it goes, but in many ways, it seems Ozersky still doesn’t get it.

In the first place, the article is couched as “advice” on how to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional catered wedding. Once you know that both the food and the space were free, the entire premise falls to pieces. Practically nobody could get what Ozersky got without paying for it. The fair market price would put it out of the range of all but the wealthiest buyers. I’m not even sure that these chefs at any reasonable price would bring just one dish to a wedding where Josh wasn’t the groom: Heather Bertinetti isn’t in the wedding cake business.

In the second place, the article misses the real reason why most catered food is bad: money. If you’re willing to pay enough, you too can have a feast fit for a king. Sietsema said that the average wedding costs $82 per person. The Times estimated that Ozersky’s wedding, if he’d paid for it, would have cost anywhere from $200 to $500 per person. Pay that much, and the quality of the food goes way up.

Parts of Ozersky’s explanation are flat-out disingenuous. He says he “cherry-picked my favorite dishes from half a dozen restaurants.” But one of those restaurants, as Sietsema noted, was Red Farm, a Jeffrey Chodorow restaurant that hasn’t even opened yet. It utterly eludes me how this could be one of his favorites.

His explanation of how the event came about doesn’t hold water:

Some of my closest friends are chefs, and when they asked me what I wanted for a wedding present, instead of a crystal decanter that I would never look at, I told them to just cook some lasagna or bake a few loaves of bread that I could share with other friends.

Now, wedding dates are usually chosen based on when the venue is available—especially in spring, the most popular season for weddings. Then, you book the hall, pay a deposit, and send out invitations about eight to twelve weeks in advance. Only then do friends start asking what you’d like for a gift, and you point them to the shops where you’ve registered.

So we’re to believe that, coincidentally, before any date was even announced, all of these chefs—eight of them are mentioned—asked him what kind of crystal decanter he’d like as a gift? Oh, and what about the conversation with Jeffrey Chodorow, when in lieu of a conventional gift, Josh asked if he could have the roof of the Empire Hotel? How did that happen?

Ozersky says that the idea for the article struck him only after the wedding took place, and that there was no quid pro quo with the chefs. This is awfully naive, assuming he even believes it. It may well be true that the chefs didn’t expect Ozersky to write about this event. But there’s no question that, in a general way, they benefit from his coverage of their restaurants on his website, ozersky.tv, and expect to do so in the future.

I’ve developed, over time, considerable respect for Ozersky’s work as a roving reporter of culinary trends. His work is nearly always entertaining, and in a few areas he is genuinely an expert. He may funnel a disproportionate share of coverage to the chefs and restaurateurs whom he likes, but there is no overt conflict of interest, because everyone knows he isn’t paying.

In this case, he wrote an article for a national magazine, which will be read by many people who are not familiar with the background. And the problem goes much deeper than a mere lack of disclosure. Once you realize that the whole wedding was free, the very premise of the article is completely demolished.

Busted! Sifton Once Banned "Delicious"; Now Uses It Himself

I wrote a piece last week about New York Times critic Sam Sifton’s repeated use of over-the-top adjectives like terrific, fantastic, perfect, and so forth. (Today’s review had another pair of terrifics.)

In 2000, when Sifton was editor of the Dining section, he chided freelance writer Andrea Strong for using delicious:

My delicious veto started about seven years ago, when my editor at the New York Times, an amazingly talented guy named Sam Sifton, returned a piece I had written for him with one comment. “Never use the word delicious,” he said. “It’s banned in my book. Gimme something more than that.” He was right. Delicious? What a cop out. It’s too easy. He wanted me to work for it, to dig deeper. And I don’t blame him. Now that I teach a food writing class, I’ve borrowed his advice for my students. Last week at our first class, I broke the news to them. “There’s one word I don’t allow in my class and it’s delicious,” I said. They looked alarmed. Why?” They asked. “Because it’s not good enough. I want to know why it’s delicious. Is it the flavors, the textures, the temperature, the contrast of all three? Give me more. Delicious is just lazy.”

Guess what? Now that Sifton is writing, rather than editing, he uses “delicious” almost every week—often twice in the same review. I won’t list them all, but here are some examples:

• ABC Kitchen: “…a few pizzas for your table would not be in error, starting with the delicious morels with Parmesan, oregano and a soft large-yolked egg…”
• Fatty ’Cue: “Dessert is delicious, but is not strictly necessary…”
• Pulino’s: “It is delicious…” and later, ”…will elicit shrugs from any New Yorker who has spent 45 minutes waiting for a table here, delicious as it is.”

Let’s all quote Andrea Strong together: “Delicious is just lazy.”

Sam Sifton's Superlative Diarrhea

     Su-per-la-tive
     adj.

1. Of the highest order, quality, or degree; surpassing or superior to all others.

2. Excessive or exaggerated.

3. Grammar Of, relating to, or being the extreme degree of comparison of an adjective or adverb, as in best or brightest.

In Sam Sifton’s review of Prime Meats, published this week, I just about lost it when I read this:

The staff is exceptionally well trained and efficient…

If the staff of a two-star restaurant is exceptionally well trained and efficient, then what will Sifton say about four-star Per Se, Eleven Madison Park, or Le Bernardin? They are exceptional. Prime Meats, I am sure, is simply doing the very good job that a two-star restaurant should.

Sam Sifton has superlative diarrhea. He casually throws around words like “terrific,” “fantastic,” “excellent,” and “perfect,” when all he really means is pretty good. There is hardly any review in which he doesn’t use some combination of these superlatives. Several reviews have had multiple terrifics.

There are two problems with this. In the first place, it’s lazy writing. Any word used so often eventually loses its meaning. Don’t tell us it’s terrific. Write a description that sounds terrific. If the service is truly exceptional, give some examples. Now, I’ll admit that I’m guilty of these short-cuts myself. But my work isn’t being sold as a professional product. Someone paid for his writing should do better.

The other problem is that these compliments are highly misleading. If he really encounters “perfection” so often, he’s setting the bar awfully low. I eat out a lot, and I seldom find anything that’s perfect. “Excellent” is a compliment I bestow infrequently. It’s not that I don’t like what I’m eating, only that such high praise should be reserved for the rare exceptions.

The problem is getting worse over time. In his inaugural review of DBGB, his only such error was saying that Daniel Boulud’s kitchens “put out perfectly cooked food.” I like Boulud, but could any sensible person say that his five New York kitchens are perfect? A month later, he panned Aureole, but managed to throw in terrific, terrifically flavorful, extremely good, spectacular, and fantastic. At two-star A Voce Columbus, there were two terrifics, two excellents, a perfect, an astounding, and a fantastic.

Some of his praise is just complete nonsense. Within four weeks of each other, he found “deep” wine lists at both Recette and The Mark. At Fatty ’Cue, he found wagyu beef meltingly tender, a phrase so hackneyed that I’d swear he lifted it from a Yelp review. That review also had incredibly good, awesome, insanely agreeable, excellent, brilliant, and unsettling.

His sex analogies probably deserve a post to themselves. At Pulino’s, the fazzoletti “you go to sleep thinking about, dreaming about, and wake up desiring.” A dish at Colicchio & Sons “tastes of…illicit rides in late-night cabs.” One at The Mark is “like a lover sliding into bed.” One at The Breslin “tastes like a date you don’t want to end.” At Strip House, “trembling good…a sorority girl in her first low-cut blouse.”

But none of these hold a candle to the sea urchin toast at Marea: “It offers exactly the sensation as kissing an extremely attractive person for the first time — a bolt of surprise and pleasure combined. The salt and fat give way to primal sweetness and combine in deeply agreeable ways. The feeling lingers on the tongue and vibrates through the body.”

I had that dish. By all means order it. But trust me on this: kissing an extremely attractive person for the first time is better.

Sifton has taken some flack this week for the cookie-cutter quality of his reviews and his repetitive use of the words very good. Previously, Eater.com noted Sifton’s over-use of “the best,” in situations that were—at the very least—dubious.

I made a list of all Sifton’s exaggerations—or as many as I could find. You’ll find them after the jump. Some could even be true, but there are clearly far too many of them. Superlative diarrhea indeed.

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Sifton Still Getting Hammered for Hergatt Review

Today, OZERSKY.TV is out with a video piece on why Sam Sifton’s two-star review of SHO Shaun Hergatt is so spectacularly wrong. The Pink Pig agrees, as do most commenters on the Times website.

Let us be clear about this: I would not mind the review if Sifton had thought the food or service wasn’t up-to-snuff. But that’s not the case: he acknowledged that the food was inpeccably prepared, and that the service matched.

Rather, he slammed the restaurant for not hewing to some kind of abstract “this is how we eat now” zeitgeist. I mean, it would be as if the Times music critic slammed the New York Philharmonic for not featuring the latest rock band.

I’m not naive enough to suppose that my shouting reaches the tender eardrums of the Times critic. It is gratifying to find a more influential commentator, like Ozersky, calling bullshit as only he can.

Born Round by Frank Bruni

I’m a slow reader. Frank Bruni’s memoir, Born Round, is two-week-old news. I finished it yesterday.

Let me first say what this book isn’t: a kiss-and-tell recap of Bruni’s five years as New York Times restaurant critic. There are twenty chapters, and he isn’t even offered the job until the sixteenth. There are anecdotes about the reviewing gig, most of which have been excerpted on various websites. But even if you don’t already know them, they’re not the reason for reading Born Round.

No, the book’s unifying theme is Bruni’s battle with a minor compulsive eating disorder. I have to call it minor, because he’s not Karen Carpenter, and he hasn’t had a rubber band surgically wrapped around his stomach. But he has struggled with self-loathing for much of his adult life. He would turn down dates if he was seven pounds too heavy. At his nadir in the early 2000s, he was upwards of 85 pounds overweight.

I can relate to some of this. At about the time Bruni hit rock-bottom, I was around 30 pounds overweight. Bruni solved it with relentless exercise. His willingness to endure six-mile runs and sadistic trainers is probably what saved him. For me, the only answer was deprivation. Today is a Wednesday. I haven’t had a full meal since Sunday, and probably won’t again until Friday. The only things I eat in the meantime are small snacks, and only a few of them. Despite that, I’m still the ever-elusive seven pounds away.

Before he hit bottom, Bruni tried just about everything: vomiting, speed, Prozac, starvation, Atkins, and many other dieting fads. Each step forward was countered with two steps back. He ate voraciously and indiscriminately. A maternalistic Times colleague wondered if he could become a restaurant critic without endangering his health.

Ironically, the reviewing job gave him the structure he needed. When eating 7–10 big meals per week is part of your job, you can’t rationalize it away. There’s no saying, “I’ll just go on a diet tomorrow.” There can be no diet. Knowing that there was no escape provided the motivation Bruni needed to stay in shape. The money he saved by not having to pay for his own meals went to trainers and health clubs. After five years of eating for a living, he is in the best physical shape of his life.

None of this would be compelling reading if Bruni wasn’t such an entertaining writer. He’s at his best when he’s writing about himself. Family members couldn’t possibly be as perfect as he makes them out to be. But when he turns inward, he writes with self-deprecating humor that makes even the most humdrum material stand out:

There were other problems with Prozac as well. While it diminished my sex drive only modestly, it pushed back its satiation much more substantially, so that I found myself going round and round the block without any sure sign that I’d ever get to pull into the garage. As often as not I just gave up and left my car idling at the foot of the driveway.

That has to be one of the better paragraphs about masturbation ever penned.

In case you haven’t heard, Bruni is gay. He writes volubly about his sex life, stopping only at the bedroom door: the film of Born Round will get a PG–13 rating with nothing left out. Growing up gay doesn’t seem to have caused him much trouble. Though his beloved Italian grandmother never knew, the rest of his family found out promptly before he was twenty, and he doesn’t seem to have suffered for it.

As a journalist, Bruni has led a charmed life, attracting one plum assignment after another. Writing well on a deadline comes easily to him. He’s also a dabbler. The five years he spent as restaurant critic appear to be the longest he has ever spent at anything. He is able to write about any subject on the shortest notice, which has spared him the necessity of developing real expertise. If he has a lifelong intellectual passion for any particular field, the book shows no evidence of it.

There is, of course, passion for family—gregarious, prosperous, well-fed, and relatively untroubled. There are two poignant deaths; aside from that, time with family is what makes him happiest. The lack of drama makes some of these episodes a tad less interesting than the rest of the book. After a while, many of the holiday dinners start to sound the same.

By now, it’s old news that Bruni did not have the conventional background for a restaurant critic. The book makes clear just how little experience he had. Until he was appointed Rome bureau chief for the Times—just two years before he got the restaurant gig—practically his only dining memories outside of the home were lowbrow: junk food, fast food, diners, chains and bodegas. Cold noodles with sesame paste was as close as he came to a gourmet experience, aside from an annual meal with Dad at the Four Seasons, and a steakhouse here and there.

After he got the restaurant job, the Times sent him on an immersion course in fine dining. Pierre Gagnaire in Paris—sampled on a whirlwind tour—seems to have been the only Michelin three-star restaurant he had ever tried in his life. The food was secondary on that occasion. The only memory he shares is that of dining in the same clothes he wore on the plane, because Air France had lost his luggage.

He has since been to a couple of other three-star places—none in France—which explains his bias as a critic. He waxes rhapsodic about ricotta cheese in Italy and Tyson’s chicken in Detroit, but the French restaurants are a blur. Indeed, given his lack of preparation for the job, it is miraculous that his tenure as a critic didn’t turn out a lot worse.

Ultimately, the book is about Bruni’s triumph over binge eating. The last chapter attempts to distill the lessons he’s learned. I don’t know how many readers will find themselves similarly situated. That’s not my case, as I’ve solved the problem my own way.

I found the book entertaining nevertheless. Bruni’s in his early 40s, but he’s had a lifetime’s worth of experiences. He makes them well worth reading about.

The Worst of Bruni

Frank Bruni’s tenure as a restaurant critic has come to an end. On Monday, we posted the Best of Bruni. Now, we turn to his failures.

My opinion of Bruni isn’t any great secret. He’s an entertaining writer and a top-notch journalist, but he had no background in food, and it showed. The Times would never put a novice in its music department or its science department. Why, then, did they put a novice in the restaurant department?

Despite his inexperience, Bruni eventually got the hang of it. Any intelligent person with a six-figure dining budget would make at least some of the right calls, and would improve with time. But his aversion to fine dining and his narrow preference for a few limited cuisines severely hampered his effectiveness.

As I did with the Best of Bruni, I’ve made a list of 10 items, but with so much to choose from, a few of the items are thematic rather than individual reviews. Here, then, is the worst of Bruni:

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The Best of Bruni

As we count down the days to Frank Bruni’s exit, it’s time to look back on the best and worst of his tenure. This post will focus on his greatest hits. Another, dedicated to his failures, is available here.

Bruni’s best reviews were his smackdowns. It’s easy to write an entertaining bad review, but describing excellence requires a depth of knowledge that Bruni didn’t have. He couldn’t really explain persuasively why things were great; he came alive when they were awful. His other successes came when he broke the mold of the conventional review format, and I’ve selected a few of those examples, too.

Here, then, are Bruni’s 10 greatest hits:

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