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Manhattan Restaurants / Restaurants / Food Travel / Franchises / T.G.I. Friday's / → All Tags

Drinking and Dining in Penn Station: The T.G.I. Friday's Experience

I'll cop to being a bit of a restaurant snob, but it's pretty much impossible to live in New York and not be one. With so many excellent eateries around town, the idea of dining or drinking at a franchise joint like Applebee's, the Olive Garden, or the Outback Steakhouse just doesn't make sense. Those places are for the corn-fed tourists in Times Square who don't know any better, right? Well, there was one franchise place that I always wanted to check out, and last week I did exactly that. My choice was a doozy: the T.G.I. Friday's in Penn Station. I wanted to find out for myself if it was as lousy as I had imagined, or if I needed to get over my little superiority complex and enjoy an experience that the rest of America seems to have no problem with.

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Manhattan Restaurants / Restaurant Reviews / Frank Bruni / Jeffery Chodorow / → All Tags

Chodorow Offers Fat Reward For Identifying Frank Bruni

Anyone who watched Jeffery Chodorow and Rocco DiSpirito battle back on NBC's The Restaurant knows that they are both certifiably nuts.

However, these days Chodorow has taken his act to a whole new level. He has had enough of New York Times critic Frank Bruni and his unfavorable reviews. Subsequently, Chodorow issued a public ban of Bruni from all 29 of his restaurants.

I'm telling my staff that the first person to recognize Bruni at any of my restaurants will be given a free trip for two to the Caribbean." The Kobe Club owner, who bought a full-page ad in the Times blasting Bruni over a zero-star review, will also post Bruni's photo on his Web site.

This after he took out a one page ad in the Times as a rebuttal to Bruni's zero star pan of the Kobe Club. In his ad he announced, amongst other things, that some people believe there is such a thing as the Rocco DiSpirito curse (someone ping Dan Shaughnessy there is another curse to write about!), and that he also, "loves his mother." And finally, Chodorow adds:

In the interest of fairness, I am introducing my personal blog, which will be a compilation of my food-related experiences and musings and a special section entitled Following Frank and After Adam, in which I will make a follow-up visit to the restaurants they write about for the purpose of reviewing their reviews. My blog will appear at www.chinagrillmgt.com/blog/. My friends in the restaurant business have warned me that there will be further retaliation against me for speaking up. So be it.

Welcome, Jeffery to what idiots and venture capitalists call "the blogosphere" Oh, and feel free to steal our above Bruni wanted poster for your own use, we don't care.

Related Stories:
· Hunt the Critic [Page Six]
· Chodorow Blog [Official Site]
· Bruni Digest [Blogspot]