This week, New York Times food critic Frank Bruni reviewed the Penthouse Executive Club, a New York strip club that also serves steak. Apparently, Bruni was exquisitely embarrassed by being in a strip club. Aquiver, he finds himself in a "pleasure palace...peddling...seductive flesh." Indeed, this is "pulchritudinous territory," one in which the excessive use of polysyllabic words, and being accompanied by three friends, are deployed in hopes of keeping any potential reportorial boners at bay. Heaven forbid! Lord knows how an erection would interfere with a food critic's ability to judge the tastiness of a T-bone that comes with a side order of onion rings. Shockingly, Bruni discovers that when you go to a strip club, the strippers actually approach you. When one girl descends upon the table and asks, "Is there anyone I can get naked for?" Bruni confesses: "On this visit...and on subsequent ones, I was derelict in my duty, failing to sample much of what the restaurant had to offer." Frank, couldn't you have saved an inch of precious Times print space with "I didn't get a lapdance"? (And what if he had? The idea of Bruni grappling with getting a true sense of the porterhouse flavor while a peachy-smelling dancer was grinding away atop his groin the entire time would have been a far more appropriate gonzo-journo approach to the subject at hand.) In the end, Bruni, it seems, surrenders himself to having a stripper administer a buttery nipple shot. Still, there's something perplexing about a man who shoos away strippers--and then ends the night with a mouth full of Reddi-wip.
