Carolina Alumni Review - November/December 2009

Brutally
Frank
The high-profile restaurant critic knew that food could be his undoing.
He took up knife and fork and attacked.
by Susan Hudson Houston ’ 84

t first, the opportunity that came to Frank Bruni ’ 86 in January 2004 sounds like a bad joke:

Q: What kind of job do you offer a man who has struggled with eating disorders for much of his life?

A: Dining seven days a week at some of the world’s best restau-

rants, sampling the likes of

wood-fired pizza, fat-mar-

bled rib eyes, creamy fettuccine Alfredo and rich molten chocolate cake night after night, and writing about it all for The New York Times’ food-centric readers.

Three years earlier, the 5-foot- 11 writer had topped out at 270 pounds, caught in a cycle of bingeing and fasting. The job? He’d take it.

“When I was asked to be the restaurant critic, I said yes, in large part because I felt like I had finally gotten a handle on my weight and I felt like I had finally broken free of the binge-purge cycle that had defined so much of my life. And I remember thinking on that date, ‘If I’m wrong about that, I’m going to be in for several miserable years.’ ”

Through disciplined eating and rigorous exercise, he had lost the extra weight and kept it off. When the critic’s position became available, Bruni had achieved a healthy balance in his life for 21⁄ 2 years.

“I also remember thinking, ‘Note to self: A couple of years from now, if the job goes well and I’m still wearing 34 pants and I’m not back up to 42, I may

A

have a story to tell.’ ”

Throughout his life, Bruni had ridden a gustatory roller coaster of soaring, celebratory excess followed by dips of repentant deprivation — from his diaper-wear-ing days, when he banged on his high chair for a third fresh-cooked hamburger (and threw up the first two burgers after not getting it); to his student writing years in the mid-1980s, when his favorite place to regurgitate, sometimes as often as every other day, was the men’s room across from The Daily Tar Heel offices; to his 30s covering the campaign of George W. Bush, when he would pile up his plate during some seven meals a day available to the press corps, fast for a day or two to make up for the overindulgence, then get up at 1 a.m. and raid the hotel minibar, running up a $2,000 tab at his own expense.

In becoming the Times’ restaurant critic, Bruni took what could have been a recipe for disaster and turned it into a challenge to maintain his size and his sanity.

The tales in his new book, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater are often funny, sometimes tragic and always brutally — like his name — frank. “I think you kind of owe readers that sort of candor,” he said. “The only way for the story to have any power is for it to seem unvarnished and honest and not like some whitewash of your own history.