NY Times Doesn't Mind Chodorow's Ad Money

The fall out from restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow's full page NY Times ad complaining about Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni continues, much to the delight of foodies, critics of restaurant critics, and mental health professionals. Last Friday, former Times food critic Mimi Sheraton wrote in Slate that Chodorow was an "idiot" to run an ad, given "the added exposure of the negative review to so many who may never have read the original."

And then the New Yorker pokes around the spat in this week's Talk of the Town. There's a brief history of other famous Times ads vs. Times critics, and then this explanation of how the ad got through:

Craig Whitney, the Times’ standards editor, said that the paper was glad to accept Chodorow’s letter. “If advertisements are not defamatory or libellous, and they meet our standards of taste, we run them,” he said. It took about five drafts, according to Chodorow, to come to a mutually acceptable version of the letter—“They beat me up a lot over it,” he said, but explained that the Times conceded on most points after he threatened to publish the piece in the Post.

That is interesting, that Chodorow is giving money to the Times, but maybe he's trying to build up more good will? The New Yorker's Lauren Collins also gets comments from Chodorow (he gets the NY Times at Starbucks), Bruni ("fresh from a jog"), and David Chang, (whose Momofuku Ssam Bar got two stars from Bruni) who thought Chodorow's ad was very The Onion-esque.

As for Chodorow's blog that was created in response to the 0-star review for the Kobe Club, it'd be better if he blogged more.