Frank Bruni is sooo good and soooo right! There is nothing better than being welcomed at your favorite “spot”. And nothing better than bringing the people you love there too. This is Eat+Drink’s entire goal - to show you the places we love.
Frank Bruni, Former Restaurant Critic, on the Joys of Repeat Visits
What a cad I used to be, constantly ditching the bistro that had opened only four months ago for the week-old trattoria with an even dewier complexion, callously trading in the yellowtail sashimi that had been so good to me for a hot tamale of unproven charms.
Then, a few years back, the restaurant Barbuto and I settled down.
It’s bliss. She knows my heart, knows my drill: a gin martini to begin, a seasonal salad for my appetizer, the roasted chicken after.
And I know her. If the weather’s nice, a breeze will blow in from the West Village streets that her retractable walls open onto. The kale that she serves me will be sparingly dressed. And the breast meat? As plump and tender as it was the last time around and the dozen times before that.
We don’t have fireworks, not this late in the game. But we have a rhythm. Sometimes that’s better.
What I’m saying is that I’m a regular there, as I am at the Breslin, whose lamb burger is as true to me as I am to it; at Empellón Taqueria, where I never stray from the fish tempura tacos, which never let me down; at Szechuan Gourmet, where I don’t glance at a menu. I don’t have to.
I’m no monogamist, that’s clear. More of a polygamist, but I dote on my sister wives. I’ve come to see that the broccolini isn’t always greener on the other side of Houston Street, and I’m here to sing what’s too seldom sung: the joys of familiarity. The pleasures of intimacy. The virtues of staying put.
What you have with a restaurant that you visit once or twice is a transaction. What you have with a restaurant that you visit over and over is a relationship.
The fashionable script for today’s food maven doesn’t encourage that sort of bonding, especially not in a city with New York’s ambition and inexhaustible variety. Here you’re supposed to dash to the new Andrew Carmellini brasserie before anybody else gets there; be the first to taste ABC Cocina’s guacamole; advertise an opinion about the Massaman curry at Uncle Boons while others are still puzzling over the fugitive apostrophe. Snap a photo. Tweet it. Then move on. There’s always something else. Always virgin ground.
For years, I was dedicated to exploring it, by dint of my duty as The Times’s restaurant critic. I was a paid philanderer. It was exhilarating. It was exhausting.