Does the Times’ new “Dining In, Dining Out” section editor have it in for Frank Bruni? Pete Wells, who starts the job this week, wrote a column in Food & Wine in March that praised Bruni Digest, a blog obsessed with the restaurant critic, for realizing that “the real fun is in sampling the ripe fruit basket of Bruni’s prose,” which can at times “vanish behind a hallucinatory haze of metaphor.” Wells and Bruni had lunch once he was hired (he’s the third food editor in four years). “Frank was very encouraging,” says Wells. “He did his best to assure me that there’s no intrinsic reason why no one has kept the job for more than a couple years.” So did Bruni take Wells’s review of his reviews personally? “Well, see, it hasn’t come up.” Bruni, on vacation in Italy, wasn’t available to comment.

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Arianne Cohen
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