KOBE BEEF.(Kobe Club)

Most mornings, Frank Bruni brews a pot of coffee and reads the online edition of the Times at his apartment, on the Upper West Side. Bruni, the paper's chief restaurant critic, had been warned that last Wednesday's Dining In section would contain an unusual advertisement. "I thought, Oh, yeah, this is the morning it's going to be out," he said recently, "so I went over to Starbucks, and got a paper." There it was, on F-9: a full-page letter, addressed to the section's editor, from the restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow. Chodorow had paid almost forty thousand dollars for the ad, including a premium for its placement, directly across from Bruni's weekly column. In the course of seven paragraphs, he accused the Times of an adhominem vendetta, assailed Bruni's credentials--"Mr. Bruni comes to us from Rome where he was not the local 'expert' on Italian cuisine; he wrote about politics"--and announced the launch of a personal blog, which would include a feature entitled "Following Frank."

Chodorow's grudge stemmed from Bruni's February 7th zero-star review of Kobe Club, his samurai-inspired steak house. "Although Kobe Club does right by the fabled flesh for which it's named, it presents too many insipid or insulting dishes at prices that draw blood from anyone without a trust fund or an expense account," Bruni had written.

"He just seemed like he picked on the smallest things," Chodorow said last week, from Las Vegas. "The potatoes were 'gluey'--they weren't! They were freshly made." He went on, "There were things in there that just didn't conform with reality." Chodorow believes that Kobe Club merits two stars, "maybe a three"--but he recalled telling a friend, "Don't even dream of that ballpark, because it's me." (Chodorow was recently responsible for the restaurants Caviar & Banana and Rocco's, the demise of which was chronicled on reality television.)

Chodorow was writing in a time-honored tradition, the literary equivalent of sending black roses. At least since Zola's "J'Accuse," public figures have turned to the open letter for the promotion of pet causes and the airing of grievances. And so--in just the past year, in the Times--Yoko Ono pleads for healing on the anniversary of John Lennon's death, the Humane Society of the United States announces a boycott of Canadian seafood, a Kuwaiti contracting conglomerate protests President Bush's policy in Lebanon ("Who deserves to be accused of being a fascist!!!!" ), and the Kazakh government sponsors a spread to encourage "Transforming the mixed blessings of a nuclear legacy." Chodorow composed his epistle en route to Italy. "I borrowed one of my people's computers," he said, "and I just basically wrote it stream-of-consciousness."

Bruni is not the first Times critic to be singled out by a subject with an exhibitionist streak. In ...