The Bruntastic has a fun little piece today about his phone escapades with new restaurants he's been trying to review. Some never answer, some hang up on him, and the Bruni is just plain sick of it. The best part: after experiencing the same things ourselves, we're almost certain the last restaurant he describes— the one that causes Bruni to ask, "So had the restaurant hung up on me or not?"—is the East Village wack job Kurve. What a review that will be. [Diner's Journal]

Bruni gets on the blog today to share about his recent dinners at Los Dados, Bar-bon-e, and Swifty's. The restaurants have little in common except that none really blew Brundog away. He has the harshest words for Los Dados: "I had the least fun and the least satisfaction at Los Dados...most of what came to the table...sort of blurred together into one tritely sweet, requisitely spicy, workman-like blur." [Diner's Journal]

A riled up Bruni offers up his first impression on UES newcomer, and Steve Cuozzo favorite, Alloro, and it's not very pretty: "The spaghetti itself...didn’t yield to utensils in any usual fashion. You had to wield your knife or fork as if it were a chisel...One of our entrees was lavender-crusted swordfish, which answered the question of what you’d encounter in a L’Occitane store if it suddenly decided to sell a line of seafood right next to the candles...The lavender presence was that sharp, that disconcerting." [Diner's Journal]

Bruni stops by BoBo to see if anything has improved. His consensus: the place is beautiful (like a cheerleader) but the food is still lacking ("uneventful enough to undercut the setting"). He also engages in some fun rumormongering: "I hear murmurs that the kitchen could be in for another overhaul; these days, who knows? Gary Robins left the restaurant Sheridan Square just a month and a half after it opened in May. Bar Blanc just got a new executive chef." [Diner's Journal]

It's not always about the food says Bruni. And so he's composed a list of the city's 12 best looking restaurants: "These are restaurants for different moods, and some ask you, in return for their distinctive looks, to make a sacrifice in terms of the quality of food you get." [Times Topics]

Yelp scores a Q&A with Bruni. The whole thing is worth a scan but here's a teaser (question: favorite neighborhoods): "There's a particular beauty to Brooklyn Heights that's so elegant and romantic: I feel like I can see Cher kicking that can down the street in that early-morning scene from 'Moonstruck.'" [Yelp]

One of Bruni's readers took his children to Napa Valley's upscale Bruni favorite Ubuntu, and the kiddies flipped over it. The story inspires the Brunster to reconsider where he takes his nephews and he wants your help: "I’ve never taken them to places of Ubuntu’s caliber. I’m not sure they’d appreciate those places, and I’m not sure that those places would be wholly welcoming. Instead we’ve gone to Mars 2112, the Jekyll and Hyde Club, Dos Caminos and Rosa Mexicano...where can I take them that will leave me and them as happy as Ubuntu left my colleague and his family?" [Diner's Journal]

The Bruni gives his first impressions of UWS newcomer Madaleine Mae, and while he's not so sure he likes the food, he's still pleased that his neighborhood is so happening right now: "And you could argue that this restaurant’s timing is just right. It comes along amid a surge (we can still use the word in non-Iraq contexts, no?) of dining activity on the Upper West Side that’s drawn the attention of restaurant lovers outside the neighborhood....[But] just about everything a friend and I ordered was overcooked." [Diner's Journal]

Bruni seems to be hot on the freelancing train these days. First he had a piece on sex lives in the Times' Week in Review section and now he's got a piece in Men's Vogue on sleeping pills. A major upside here—we get to delve deeper into the mind of the Bruns: "Of course I got greedy. I figured that one and a half pills would work better than one, and for an absolute guarantee on a crucial night — well, two might be in order...Sleep is the new sex, a restorative that everyone else is having more and better of than we are and that gets harder to tumble into as we age." [Men's Vogue]

Bruni, never one to be fooled, takes all those "local" restaurants to task for claiming to be more local than they actually are. He's looking at a lot of you restaurateurs out there but makes an example out of the Miami hit, Michael's Genuine Food & Drink: "I remarked that while the restaurant’s menu notes 'local pompano' and 'local black grouper' and 'local snapper,' it doesn’t use the word 'local' before 'yellowfin tuna tartare.'...It’s not local. In fact, he couldn’t tell me off the top of his head where it comes from. But it has the color and taste diners expect...I drew his attention to the 'giant prawn' on the menu...Where are the giant prawns from? 'I’m not sure,' he said..." [Diner's Journal]

The Bruni hops on the listing restaurant playlists bandwagon—one of the oldest tricks in the food blogging book—to note how incongruous some musical choices are to the schmancy restaurant settings. And if the playlist from today's post isn't enough, don't worry kids: Franktastic will post the playlists from every restaurant he visited on his nationwide trip. Today we learn of his love for songstresses Alanis Morissette and Bjork: "That was my reaction, too, when I heard a Alanis Morissette — I’m pretty sure the song was 'You Oughta Know'...an angry pop tirade against infidelity that, I might add, stands the test of time a whole lot better than many other pop songs do...I heard one of my all-time favorite songs, a haunting, simple, gorgeous track by Bjork, 'Unravel'." [Diner's Journal]

From Bruni's podcast about DC restaurant Central Michel Richard: "I had a couple of questions about the service...I remember a moment I would call close to tragic when our wine glasses were completely empty. I think we went ten minutes without wine. I call that restaurant hell." [NYT]

Starting today and continuing over the next three Wednesdays Franktastic is going write up the top ten new non-NYC restaurants around the country. And he has this backhanded compliment for the locals: "My trip didn’t shake my conviction that New York is the finest restaurant city in the nation, with an unrivaled range and depth of options. But...it was a challenge to the smug superiority New Yorkers sometimes feel...the city doesn’t have it all. It doesn’t have anything exactly like Cochon, in New Orleans...New York doesn’t have anything as highfalutin as Guy Savoy, in Las Vegas...And New York doesn’t have anything as homey as Tilth, in Seattle..." [NYT]