Pat Bruno Battling Cancer, Older than Previously Admitted

By Anthony Todd in Food on Oct 12, 2011 2:30PM

The internet has been tweeting and crowing about the appointment of Michael Nagrant to the coveted post of Sun-Times dining critic - an appointment that was well deserved. Pat Bruno, the recently fired critic, has fallen by the wayside as ousted figures often do. Many people didn't like him or didn't respect his ethics - but here's one thing that we can respect: he didn't use extenuating circumstances to create buzz around his firing. It turns out Pat Bruno is fighting cancer. And he's also 77, not 68 as previously reported.

Robert Feder at Time Out pointed us to a Washington Post article where "Pasquale" Bruno (the name that Grub Street revealed he uses on non-critic-work) discusses his battle with cancer. The worst part? It's a cancer that may have been caused by a food-borne virus.

The article is worth reading, if only to remind us that Bruno can still put together a compelling article and deserves respect. We may be jaded about the last few of his 26 years of food writing, but this shows that Bruno may have only been burned out on the job, not the craft of writing.