“You’re asking me for advice to give to your friends in Delhi, who are going to give that advice to the tandoor guys there who have never roasted a turkey in their cavernous, wickedly hot oven before? Here’s my advice: They’ve cooked a lot of chickens. Tell them it’s a really big chicken. Cut and run.”

– Sam Sifton’s Thanksgiving Help Desk over at the NYT.com may be the best thing you will read on the Internet today. Particularly if you don’t happen to be the one in the kitchen cooking. Also, apparently there are some jokester West Wing fans out there. See here for reference.

In his memo to staff Bill Keller called the appointment a “no-brainer,” saying that “after more than four years overseeing the integration of the print and Web newsrooms and the spectacular flowering of journalistic innovation that accompanied it, Jon yearns to get back to running coverage, to refresh his roots.” Full memo below:

To the Staff:

After much deliberation, and a fair amount of not-even-in-the-ballpark speculation from Times-obsessed kibbitzers, we have a new culture editor to replace Sam Sifton. He is, I’m delighted to announce, Jon Landman.

Like the appointment of Sam as our new restaurant critic, this is one of those no-brainers that nonetheless requires some explaining because of the broader implications for the newsroom. After more than four years overseeing the integration of the print and Web newsrooms and the spectacular flowering of journalistic innovation that accompanied it, Jon yearns to get back to running coverage, to refresh his roots. I doubt anyone will question that Jon brings to the Culture Department a strenuous intelligence, an inspiring vision, a gift for getting the very best from people and — no small thing as our competitive landscape shifts — a keen appreciation of what
culture journalism can be on the Web. He spent a transitional year presiding over the department, implementing a sweeping overhaul of the department and grooming new leadership — including Sam Sifton — before he moved to the digital job. We interviewed a number of candidates, and were happily reminded in the process of the wealth of talent in our midst. But we’re pretty sure the other candidates would agree that Jon Landman will be an extraordinary culture editor. That’s the no-brainer part of the announcement.

While we’re on the subject of Culture, we would like to tip our hats to Amy Virshup, who has kept the department functioning at its customary high level in the weeks since Sam moved into vacation and tastebud preparation mode.
We have, of course, given intense thought to what this means for our digital journalism, which is so vibrant a part of our present and so central a part of our future. Our belief is that this is a moment to complete the integration of the newsroom we began five years ago.

As the deputy managing editor for digital, Jon has worked to bring down the psychological barriers, bureaucratic impediments, and we-don’t-do-things-that-way attitudes that separated the cultures of new and mainstream newsgathering. He has been a tireless champion of new ways to reach and engage our audience — journalism by unconventional means. He has advocated the full partnership of digital and print, journalism and technology. He has brought us an enormous distance toward the goal of a single, versatile, journalistic multiplex.

But not quite all the way. In proposing this change, Jon made a strong case that, in the next stage of integration, the support and promotion of this new kind of journalism must become more fully the responsibility of the newsroom’s top leadership — me, Jill and John. He reminded me that in the original proposal for an integrated
newsroom — May, 2005 — I insisted that it is not enough to create new advocates for Web journalism within the NYT newsroom; the newsroom would be truly integrated only when the top editors took as much responsibility for our digital journalism as they do for the more traditional kind. We’ve stopped a little short of that ambition, in large part because we had Jon to defer to and depend on. We’ll have more to say on this important subject, but the main thing to say now is that Jill and I, in particular, see this as time to rearrange our priorities and devote more of our bandwidth to digital journalism.

Jon will not be extracting himself from the Web, not by a long shot. He will, of course, be deeply engaged in the Web as culture editor. He will also be part of a new advisory group that will work closely with me, Jill and John, counseling us on the continuing development of Nytimes.com and assuring strong advocacy of innovative ways to touch our audience.

Best,
Bill

The event of such geopolitical import? Why, only the pending announcement of a successor to fabulous Frank Bruni — colorful critic extraordinaire, populist man of the people — who is just weeks away from “hanging up his napkin,” as NYT executive editor Bill Keller ultimately put it an internal memo knighting culture editor Sam Sifton as the man for the job. The memo called the choice of Sifton “both obvious and eccentric”; the same could have been said for the 2005 tapping of Bruni, then head of the Times’ Rome bureau by way of Washington DC.

Tuesday night, the Observer‘s John Koblin had set off a short-lived round of speculation when he reported that Bruni’s replacement would be made public by the end of the week. (One can’t help but imagine Keller tapping his fingers together in satisfaction, Monty Burns style, as he then released the news just hours later.) Koblin floated a few names for the job – Sifton not among them – but he also, per Grimes’ point, noted the similarities between the prestige of restaurant criticism in New York City and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, quoting Ruth Reichl, herself a former Sultan:

“[Craig] Claiborne could make or break restaurants. Mimi Sheraton wielded that power with more glee than anyone before or since and she, too, could make or break restaurants. But over the years, we’ve seen decreasing amounts of power. … I think people read the column with interest especially when it’s a good writer, but whether people take that word as gospel? That has really changed. There are so many knowledgeable people weighing in!”

But one such knowledgeable person, Josh Ozersky, once of Grub Street and currently of Citysearch (itself a cacophany if ever there was one) sees a consolidation of power above the anarchy. “While it’s true that the field of food criticism has become Balkanized (sic), and that there are many, many more voices than there ever were before, that only gives the remaining ‘legitimate’ critics greater authority,” he wrote. “No matter how many raves a place receives from the likes of me or Easy Ed [Levine, of Serious Eats], a pan in the Times will kill it.”

Bruni did not shy from the critical pan; a retrospective on Eater yesterday calculated that the man had stripped 24 stars from 17 restaurants over his 5-year tenure, including a surprise downgrade of Danny Meyer’s flagship Union Square Café in his third-to-final filing yesterday. Luckily for readers who cherish the cutthroat, there are early indications that Sifton will pull no punches either. In a gloriously blunt Talk to the Newsroom Q&A in 2007 during his stint as culture editor, Sifton responded to allegations of anti-semitism from an aggrieved Jewish theater group thusly: “The Jewish Theater of New York has been putting on substandard work for more than a decade and was showing no sign of improvement…. Mr. Tenenbom can cry censorship all he likes. He might be better served by writing better plays.” Sharpen those knives!

He’ll need the weapons: as Ozersky notes, the current medley of opinions is often about, rather than above, the words of the Major Critic. Indeed, a cottage industry has sprung up around the topic of Frank Bruni himself: Eater has for years laid down odds on the outcomes of his reviews – going so far as to carefully differentiate between “two luke-warm stars” and “an encouraging, nurturing one star” in their bets (which were promptly themselves audited). Perhaps the best representation of the Internet’s offbeat infatuation with dear Bruni is the tragically dormant Bruni Digest, in which author Jules Langbein “[sat] on a dirt mound somewhere in Brooklyn with my ears pricked, waiting for … Bruni, who I imagine to be a Venetian count in a huge ruffled collar, to dole out stars from the inside breast pocket of his brocaded chamber robe.”

Indeed, Bruni cut a hedonistic figure (the man was unable to write about steak without describing the stains it made on his shirt and lap) with a glutton’s love for food both four-star and fast. His upcoming memoir, Born Round, describes in affecting detail his lifelong struggle with his weight and includes many a food-porn description, whether of his mother’s chicken divan or his first crackling bite of duck breast. But it also recalls such details like his childhood appreciation for Farah Fawcett’s hair and the playlist (think: Eurythmics) that provided the soundtrack to his sporadic workouts. It is not unlike his reviews, which touch on the soft shell crab but also the hard bodies of the servers bearing it, describing the menu but also the music. He has even been known to write in drag.

Predictably, not all of the balkanized bloggers have been charmed by Bruni’s creativity; many a snob — Serbia? — has sniffed that the critic would do better to just focus on the food. Those types may find solace in Sifton: where Bruni is an eater, Sifton is a chef: the former writes in Born Round of inhaling cold sesame noodles on his futon, while his successor will teach you how to make them. Still, Sifton brings the necessary acerbic cheer and a deep well of cultural knowledge to the role. Like Bruni, he was chosen to, in Bill Keller’s phrasing, provide “the lift”. And the lilt: in the ever-more democratic food writing universe, it’s crucial for the Times to maintain its unique voice.

It’s also crucial to maintain anonymity. Like it did with Bruni, the Times stripped Sifton’s profile photo from the site in advance of the announcement. But Google caches die hard, and already a pair of Sifton snapshots are circulating on the Internet and in the kitchens of restaurants citywide. Gawker wasted no time in soliciting Photoshopped suggestions for Sifton’s inevitable disguises, with responses ranging from mashups with Anna Wintour to Vladamir Putin (shirtless, natch) to Kate Gosselin. (In a nice meta twist, one of the house recommendations featured the mug of Bruni himself.) Keller, for his part, dismissed the rising moans that Sifton is too recognizable:

A review is almost always based on multiple, unannounced visits at different meals, and a reviewer’s own experience can be cross-checked with intelligence from others. So, while we don’t intend to put Sam’s face on sides of MTA buses, I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over this. And, don’t forget, New York has some of the world’s best cosmetic surgeons.

Those familiar with Sifton’s work since his Mugger days alongside Russ Smith at theNew York Press seem thrilled by his prospects. The blogosphere’s most potent quotable, Eater’s Lockhart Steele, called the late 90′s-era Press his “bible” and noted in an email that “if Sifton brings even just a few strands of that DNA to the NYT restaurant review scene, it’ll be fantastic.” (He also issued a word of caution to any would-be lotharios, noting that he and a friend visited the bar Botanica in 1996 based on its recommendation, by Sifton and his staff, as Best Hetero Pickup Scene: “In retrospect, or at least our experience, they were probably joking.”)

I left a comment on the Times’ Diner’s Journal blog asking the incoming critic what had changed the most since he last wore the restaurant critic hat years ago at the New York Press, and in his generous response, he honed in on the obvious:

The biggest change in restaurant criticism since my days at NYPress is — hands down — the Internet. I don’t know that I trust the opinion of that guy who loved the sandwiches at Xie Xie and wrote about it on his blog, or Yelp, or Eater, or Midtown Lunch. (Why prevaricate? I don’t trust his opinion.) But boy oh boy do I like the photographs he’s posted, the menu he’s scanned, the information he’s provided for all to share. For myself, I look forward to joining that discussion.

And we, the wee Bulgarias of the blogosphere, the Macedonias of the media, look forward to it too. Bon appetit.

[Ed. note: After much debate, we went with lower-case "b" for "balkanized," named though it is for a properly-named region, based on careful study and reliance on our own bible, Merriam Webster Online.]

Katie Baker has contributed to Gawker, the Yale Daily News, Young Manhattanite, and US College Hockey Online. Her blog can be found here. She also has a day job.

Sam Sifton's sesame noodles (The Wednesday Chef)

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced today that culture editor Sam Sifton will replace Frank Bruni‘s as the Times‘ restaurant critic. Keller announced the decision in in an email earlier today.

[Sifton] has run two departments exceptionally well, and nobody would be surprised to see him running something in the future. For now, though, his running will be on a treadmill at the gym. After some overdue vacation and a few weeks of warmup eating, Sam will take over the critic’s chair in October.

Sifton — ultimately the “obvious and eccentric choice” for Keller —  won out over two or three other Times writers and Brett Anderson of the Times-Picayune, the only external candidate according to The New York Observer.

Bruni, who Keller said was “not the obvious choice” when he was first pulled from the Rome Bureau to be restaurant critic, will continue to write for the Sunday magazine, when he’s not busy promoting his latest book, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater (2009).

Keller’s email in full:

To the Staff:

In the weeks since the announcement that Frank Bruni would be hanging up his napkin, we’ve received numerous applications for the job of NYT restaurant critic. We narrowed the list, and then narrowed it some more. We had some really impressive candidates, writers who know their food and have interesting things to say about the way we eat.

Then we threw out the list and drafted Sam Sifton.

The choice is both obvious and eccentric.

It is obvious because, as a brilliant editor of the Dining section, as an occasional essayist on food for our magazine, and as a writer of discernment and wit and erudition, he is the best candidate any of us can think of. This is a marquee job for The Times, and our next critic will have the unenviable job of following Frank Bruni. It is an obvious choice, too, because the prospect of reading Sam on a regular basis brings big smiles to our faces. Joe Lelyveld used to ask of any prospective appointment or promotion, “Where’s the lift?” On this one, the question pretty much answers itself.

It is eccentric because we are stealing one of our finest editors from one of our most important departments. This is certain to be a cause of anguish and anxiety in Culture, where Sam has run things with great skill, imagination, energy and good humor. Everyone understands that Sam the Culture Editor will be as hard an act to follow as Frank the Resaurant Critic. We’ve set ourselves the task of finding a new Culture Editor who will give us a lift, too. And we expect the anguish and anxiety to be short-lived.

For the record, it is our expectation that this will not be the end of Sam’s career as an editor/manager/entrepreneur/mentor. He has run two departments exceptionally well, and nobody would be surprised to see him running something in the future. For now, though, his running will be on a treadmill at the gym.

After some overdue vacation and a few weeks of warmup eating, Sam will take over the critic’s chair in October.

Best,
Bill

Photo: The Wednesday Chef.