Dining

Speaking in UNC’s Carroll Hall this fall, Frank Bruni told audience members something they already knew: Chapel Hill’s food scene is on the rise. Still, a little praise from a former The New York Times restaurant critic doesn’t hurt, even if his Tar Heel status might make him a bit biased.

The UNC alumnus, 46, returned to town in November for a weekend of speaking engagements, including the Carroll Hall lecture about his career in journalism and a talk at the UNC Conference on Eating Disorders.

Bruni, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1986, has written for the New York Post and The Detroit Free Press. The author of three books, he is now a staff writer for The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

CHM: You were just in town for two speaking engagements, and it was the first time you’d been back since you graduated. What was it like to be back in Chapel Hill?

FB: It was really nice. I had some very strong visual memories of the town – having gone to school there for four years I became very familiar with it. But it’s interesting, especially the way memory works, that some things were exactly as I remembered them, and then, of course, the campus itself has changed. I took a run one morning, and I ran a route I used to sometimes run when I was a student there that took me kind of out where the hospital and medical center are, and that looks like a kind of small city compared to what it looked like when I was there in the mid-’80s. It’s changed a lot. But as far as the old campus and the core stretch of Franklin Street, well, there have been some slight cosmetic changes, but it looked much the same. It was really lovely to travel back in time like that.

CHM: You grew up in White Plains, New York. What brought you down here for school?

FB: In high school, I went to a private school outside of Hartford, Connecticut, and it was one of the northeastern prep schools that got to nominate people for the Morehead Foundation Scholarship [now the Morehead-Cain Foundation]. So I got a Morehead Scholarship to Chapel Hill, and that’s what brought me there.

CHM: Can you share with me some of your favorite memories from your time here?

FB: I mean, four years is a long time. A lot of the ones that stick with me, just because my brain is so wired to think about food, are food-related. I remember the first time I ever ate hummus or knew what hummus was was at a vegetarian restaurant called Pyewacket that was on the stretch of Franklin Street going toward Carrboro. It’s not there anymore. I hung out at the bar there a lot – I had some older friends. I remember eating hummus and drinking whiskey sours. You know, both were totally new to me.