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.

Familiarity Breeds Content

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.

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Sometimes I wonder if we’re doing this tipping thing all wrong.

Leaving a Tip: A Custom in Need of Changing?

Try one of these techniques if you want better service in restaurants:

1. Become very famous;

2. Spend $1,000 or more on wine every time you go out;

3. Keep going to the same restaurant until you get V.I.P. treatment; if that doesn’t work, pick another place.

Now, here is a technique that is guaranteed to have no effect on your service: leave a generous tip.

I’ve tipped slightly above the average for years, generally leaving 20 percent of the total, no matter what. According to one study, lots of people are just like me, sticking with a reasonable percentage through good nights and bad. And it doesn’t do us any good, because servers have no way of telling that we aren’t the hated type that leaves 10 percent of the pretax total, beverages excluded.

Some servers do try to sniff out stingy tippers, engaging in customer profiling based on national origin, age, race, gender and other traits. (The profiling appears to run both ways: another study showed that customers tended to leave smaller tips for black servers.)

I could go on against tipping, but let’s leave it at this: it is irrational, outdated, ineffective, confusing, prone to abuse and sometimes discriminatory. The people who take care of us in restaurants deserve a better system, and so do we.  

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I swear summer isn’t over and I’m going to keep the grilling going far into the fall!

Flavor Is Only Skin Deep

Welcome to the Post-Marinade Era of Grilling

Forget about marinades, at least on the grill.

That may sound like backyard apostasy, since common knowledge holds that grilling and marinating go together like … well, fill in your favorite eternal twosome here. You can’t open a cookbook or look at a restaurant menu without seeing them paired.

It may be due at least partly to the fact that a “tequila marinated grilled flank steak” sounds more enticing that just a plain old steak. But there’s also a well-rehearsed rationale for the partnership.

Marinating, it’s said, not only adds flavor and moisture that will stay with the food through the rigors of the grilling process, but also tenderizes whatever you’re about to put over the coals.

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I love these Find. Eat. Drink guys and now they have an NYC trending report in Gotham Magazine.  Love.

Find. Eat. Drink Trending Report

Welcome to our bi-monthly Find. Eat. Drink. trending report, highlighting the top five spots where chefs, bartenders, and industry pros are eating and drinking around New York City.  READ MORE