A few of the best stories spied elsewhere on the Web this week:
Learn some new holiday cooking and baking skills with this roundup of Thanksgiving cooking classes across the nation.
Not surprisingly, an Aloha, Ore., man was fined $300 for calling 911 to complain about his botched McDonald's drive-through order.
Design icon Isaac Mizrahi will sell tartan-topped cheesecakes from Junior's on QVC in early December.
Los Angeles' popular Kogi Korean Taco Truck gets a tricked out Toyota Scion Kogi xD Mobile Kitchen that's fully loaded with a grill, a sink and an Alpine Sound System.
Restaurant consulting firm Baum + Whiteman released its 2010 food and dining trend forecast, which claims "fried chicken is the new pork belly."
Former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni sold the TV rights to his memoir, "Born Round."
Anthony Bourdain.
Photo: New York City
Wine & Food Festival.
When we got our hands on a coveted ticket to the Frank Bruni/Anthony Bourdain TimesTalks event, we were psyched to attend. What could be more fun than witnessing the outgoing New York Times restaurant critic participating in a culinary spar with the preeminent enfant terrible of the chef world?
Not surprisingly, Bourdain is a natural and answered practically every Bruni question with a clever, brutally honest quip. Bruni began by inquiring about one of the more unusual things he had seen Bourdain eat on his Travel Channel show, "No Reservations." The delicacy in question was a warthog's rectum. After firing off a few expletives, Bourdain admitted that while he was eating the warthog delicacy, he knew he was "in trouble," adding he humbly tries to eat everything that people around the globe offer him.
"Where we're going is based on directors we like and want to dupe," Bourdain said of the show. "We want to make something along the lines of films we admire." Of course, he capped the exchange off with a self-mocking, "But, it's all about me in the end."
How does a man with a price tag on his head -- or at least his face -- keep from having his photo snapped by fellow partygoers or folks out for a hefty reward? Former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni explains the art of ducking the spotlight in this Skype video from Salon's Kerry Lauerman.
Frank Bruni (left) and interviewer John Berman. Photo: ABC News "Nightline."
Restaurant devotees tuning into Wednesday night's edition of ABC News "Nightline," slavering for juicy tidbits from the upcoming tell-all penned by departing New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni were treated to an intimate portrait of ... uh, the poignant tale of ... OK, the dude wants to sell some books. This was his infomercial.
It's hard to blame the guy. For the past five years, the admitted former bulimic who once sported a 42-inch waistband was the most fear-inducing eater in all of New York's five boroughs, his deft, often hilarious and scathing reviews packing the power to loft or condemn restaurants' fates -- around 270 of them during his tenure at the Times -- despite his intensely conflicted relationship with food and the constant pressure to maintain anonymity by means of unflattering wigs, stick-on facial hair and fake reservation names he'd sometimes forget upon arrival at the host's stand.
In his first network interview since taking on this trencherman's task in 2004, Bruni -- publicly revealing his face on video for the first time to a national audience -- talked about his lifelong battle with overeating and the extreme, often unsuccessful measures he took to combat his epic binges.
"I believe that food that rhymes is almost always better than food that doesn't rhyme, don't you?" he says in the outtake released to the press, in which he calls a reporter "namby-pamby" for ordering a soft-serve ice cream cone instead of his own adventurous "South of the Border" choice.
Who knows if new national critic Sam Sifton will have Bruni's talent with one-liners, but we do know that, after reading this morning's (very accurate) description of the dinner review process, we will miss him: About a woman who "fumed" if her steak arrived at the table already cut, he writes, "People are as strange about eating as they are about love. They want what they want."
Perhaps our favorite description, though, is of those who just don't eat. One friend demanded that they order a fatty porterhouse with fries, and then "She commenced such frantic knife and fork movements that a veritable cloud of dust rose around her -- I was reminded of a Road Runner cartoon. When the dust settled 15 minutes later, I took a close look at her plate, and almost nothing was missing. The food had just been reconstituted and rearranged, a Picasso of its former self."
If this is the stuff of his new memoir, we'll be reading it.
"Born Round," the new Frank Bruni memoir. Photo: Amazon.com.
Mark your calendars, fans of "Garlic and Sapphires" and other food critic memoirs. Frank Bruni, the outgoing critic at the New York Times and the man behind the upcoming memoir "Born Round," will be blabbing to the press -- ABC News' "Nightline," to be exact -- about his history with food, including a childhood eating disorder this coming Wednesday night at 11:35 EST.
Choice quotes from a press release reveal that Bruni was on the Atkins diet at age 8 -- "Mom bought it in hardcover ... I remember leafing through it and learning about ketones and ketosis and you know, having no idea what that meant, I was 8 years old, but I thought, 'Oooh that's profound stuff. If I can get into this ketosis thing I'll be home free. I'll be skinny.' " Even later, in college, "I threw up a lot of my meals. Whenever I would eat a meal that would get out of hand, I would throw it up." Now Bruni has an incredible workout routine and -- perhaps most astonishing to those of us who write about food for a living -- is the same weight as when he started his gig five years ago.
We know we'll be watching, and we'll post our deepest thoughts about the interview online the next day.
For healthy ways to stay slim, check out our sister site, thatsfit.com.
"First let me introduce myself. I'm Craig Claiborne, and this is Julia Child." Photo: Scanned from A Feast Made for Laughter
"And to tell the truth, I was bored with restaurant criticism. At times I didn't give a damn if all the restaurants in Manhattan were shoved into the East River and perished. Had they all served nightingale tongues on toast and heavenly manna and mead, there is just so much that the tongue can savor, so much that the human body (and spirit) can accept, and then it resists. Toward the end of my days as restaurant critic, I found myself increasingly indulging in drink, the better to endure another evening of dining out. I had become a desperate man with a frustrating job to perform." -- from 'A Feast Made for Laughter' by Craig Claiborne, New York Times Dining editor and restaurant critic, 1982
While there have thus far been no reports of departing New York Times restaurant critic and newly-minted memoirist Frank Bruni tipsily pressing ham against the windows of the Second Avenue Deli, rolling members of the Cipriani family for spare change and Bellini drippings, or skulking through the catacombs at Ninja New York, randomly alarming the goofily hooded servers, it's not as if he's going silently into that last bite.
We reported back in May, along with the rest of the food blogosphere, that Frank Bruni, dining critic for the New York Times, was departing his beat as perhaps the most powerful journalist in the national restaurant scene.
Blogs like Eater, Grub Street and Gawker covered the departure obsessively, and their sadness at the departure of the man some called the Brunz -- or when feeling particularly tender, "King Brunz" -- was palpable.
Now Sam Sifton has stepped into the spotlight and, as editor Bill Keller's memo notes, up to the treadmill. (Bruni wrote about his rigorous workout routine for Men's Vogue). Food writers are already apoplectic about the newcomer: Eater has given the casual "Sifty" a shot, whereas Gawker is far more interested in finding a proper costume for the not-at-all-anonymous Sifton, who has long been the Gray Lady's Culture Editor. No doubt the suggestions of Gawker commenters, which range from Harry Potter to Lenny Dykstra to Anna Wintour, will prove helpful to the new critic.
Frank Bruni is leaving the New York Times dining section. And food bloggers are freaking out.
In a world where restaurants live or die by the awarding of Bruni's stars, blogs like Eater declare this no less than an "Apocalypse." Bruni will be turning his attention to his new memoir come August, and will be a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine.
Now the hunt (and speculation) begins to locate a food critic with the ability to carry Bruni's swagger: Ryan Sutton at Bloomberg, one of the few fairly anonymous critics left in town? Perhaps the L.A. Times' S. Irene Virbila is waiting by her phone, since the Times has pulled from our rival city to the west (a la Ruth Reichl) in the past. Grub Street wonders if (gasp) a blogger will be chosen. And does anonymity, so hard to preserve in the Internet era, matter any more to Pete Wells, the dining editor at the Times?
Perhaps the most curious quote in Bill Keller's announcement is that Bruni "will be turning in his restaurant-critic credentials." Uh, could someone get us a copy of those? Is there, like, a laminated round of foie gras passed from critic to critic? Frank, just drop us a line and let us know.
Parisian food critic François Simon is known for his sharp tongue and highly observant reviews (some think he was the model upon which Ratatouille's Anton Ego was based).
In some sectors, it's practically de rigueur (and awfully hilarious) to rip on the rarefied findings of NY Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni, but I've gotta say I tend to dig his indignation as expressed through the fewer-holds-barred medium of the website's Diner's Journal. I certainly jibe with his notions of the judiciously applied dress code and the diner's right to doggie bags, but I'm almost irrationally delighted by his use of the bully pulpit to call out the stealthy price jabbings of high-end restaurants.
He specifically cites the same outrageous charges (his boiling point is $7, mine was $6) for postprandial tea that I'd kvetched about a while back. Nothing falutin', not a monkey-harvested Pur-eh or shade-grown sencha -- just in his case a mint T-brand tea (which tea purists would prefer we refer to as a "tisane" rather than a tea as it's actually an herbal infusion, but I digress) which at $17.95 for 1.76 oz tin, retail, would surely produce, uh, more than 2.56 cups. Yes, service, water heating, cups, rent, etc. don't come for free but still, the whole enterprise is quite crabby-making in this strained economy.
Mr. Bruni, we salute your foray into the consumer advocacy front and will be following the "That Costs What?!?" series juuuust as soon as you get that pesky RSS tag fixed ravenously.
In some sectors, it's practically de rigueur (and 
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