WHOEVER succeeds Frank Bruni as the New York Times’ restaurant critic when he moves to the Times magazine this summer can count on two things:
You’ll have much less clout than your predecessors. And you’ll work much harder for the privilege.
Although still important, Times restaurant reviews are loads less influential than 10 years ago, when they’d already lost much of their exaggerated make-or-break power. The once-almighty pulpit has fallen like a buffalo to army ants.
Younger diners don’t care what the Times says. There’s brighter, breezier restaurant coverage elsewhere. Many locals take their munching orders from the Zagat Survey and foreign big-spenders from the New York Michelin Guide.
Yapping blogs exhaust what there is to say about a place before it opens. Rock-star chefs like Masaharu Morimoto shrug off snotty Times reviews like flies.
Yet, otherwise sane food-watchers, especially the blogs, seem more focused on Bruni’s successor — Eater.com calls the situation an “apocalypse” — than on actual restaurants. They should worry more about what shape the embattled Times, which is slashing sections and employee salaries, will be in by the time it gets around to naming a replacement.
Maybe to reassure the wannabes, Bruni declared on his Diners’ Journal blog this week that he’s never had a problem with his expense account. Well, no one suggested he did. Does the next critic have an unpleasant surprise in store?
Don’t blame Bruni for his job’s shortened stick. In fact, only his remarkable combination of skill, energy and determination to bring it into the 21st century saved the job from total irrelevancy.
Where earlier Times critics eked out a weekly review, Bruni is also a dining-scene reporting machine. He writes engagingly on culinary matters large and small, in the paper and on its Diners’ Journal blog. He generously lends online shout-outs to his competitors’ work. All that while making his “anonymous” reviewing rounds that are more grueling than glamorous.
The lucky soul who follows Bruni will be hard-pressed to match him in an age when stars mean nothing anyway. The scales are all over the map: three in Michelin, four in the Times, five in the Daily News, six in New York Magazine and Time Out New York — and none at all in The Post, which realized the whole system is a joke.
Yet many stubbornly believe that Times twinklers really, really count. Once, a three- or four-star review could “make” a new place for a decade. Today, it can still fill the house — briefly. The buzz often wears off in a month or two. Lots of places that drew raves from Bruni, William Grimes or Ruth Reichl did not last long. Some keeled within two years.
Call the death toll: Cena, Atlas, AZ, Lespinasse, Biltmore Room, Pico, Union Pacific, Ilo, Peacock Alley, Atelier, Alain Ducasse, Country, Fiamma and Town.
The Times lost its muscle with midrange eateries as well. Last summer, it carried mostly approving, two-star reviews of Bar Milano and Bar Q, and a one-star drubbing of Benoit. Then what happened? Bar Milano did so poorly, it changed its name to Inoteca and switched to a cheap, small-plates format. Bar Q died. Benoit lives.
Those outcomes don’t mean Times reviewers had it wrong. In fact, their verdicts in nearly every case were in line with those elsewhere. But a rare instance when the Times broke from the pack — its one-star pan of Mas in 2004 — exemplifies the most embarrassing measure of its decline: It lost its once fearsome power to ruin a new place with a bad review.
Years ago, a grumpy Times write-up might have buried an untested Downing Street joint with entrees up to $35, or at least forced the ouster of then little-known chef/partner Galen Zamarra.
Instead, Mas proved so popular, it had to add an extra room. That prompted Bruni to revisit last year and up it to two-star status, claiming it had “grown wiser” with time.
The “I survived the Times” roster goes way beyond the review-proof likes of Cipriani and Michael’s. It includes Hudson Cafeteria, Amaranth, Asiate, Rosa Mexicano, Morimoto, the Russian Tea Room, Ninja, Morandi and Delicatessen — all of which took zero- or one-star hits from various critics.
Mercer Kitchen is still kicking despite being demoted from two stars to none in 2007. Three Upper West Side places that took recent one-star slaps — BarBao, West Branch and Kefi — appear thriving.
But what about all the restaurants slammed by the Times that indeed died or replaced their chefs?
Well, what about them? One of my early Post reviews was a zero-star takedown of an Indian place called Salient. It closed a week later. Last year, the Plaza’s Palm Court gave up soon after I’d clobbered it. I never took it as evidence of holding life-or-death power over places that should never have opened.
Owners pay attention to every review. The new Monkey Bar just dumped chef Elliot Ketley. Bruni hasn’t reviewed it yet. But two others have beaten the bejesus out of it: this columnist and Bloomberg’s Ryan Sutton. Do you think Graydon Carter didn’t notice?
Yet egotistical chefs and gullible food writers love to blame closings and firings almost entirely on the Times. Fueling the fallacy is the fact that the Times, like a hyena, often waits to pile on until the corpse has been ravaged and picked apart by others.
Waverly Inn chef John DeLucie’s new book, “The Hunger,” relates the short life of Colina where he once cooked, and states, “The scathing Times review didn’t help.” Of course it didn’t — but that Italian fiasco with an unintelligible menu had already been pummeled in The Post and elsewhere. It was finished long before Grimes’ last licks.
A 2007 New York Observer story, “Feel the Bruni Effect,” ridiculously linked the end of Western-style steakhouse Lonesome Dove and “wine-driven” Varietal to Bruni’s write-ups. But both stinkers had already been mauled by most other reviewers and were empty from day one. Laying their closings on the Times was like blaming the Yankees’ 22-4 loss to Cleveland on the umpire who called the final out.
In any case, Lonesome Dove didn’t close until four months after the Times leapt in. What “Bruni Effect”?
So, why the frenzy over who’ll follow him? And who’d want a job so uniquely demanding, yet now with scarcely a whiff of the might that once made it worth the agita?
scuozzo@nypost.com