Frank Bruni has been a restaurant critic for The New York Times since April 2004. In August 2009, Mr. Bruni went on leave for his book “Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater” (Penguin Press, August 2009) and will return as a contributor to The New York Times Magazine.

Previously, as Rome bureau chief from July 2002 to March 2004, Mr. Bruni showed a flair for epicurean subjects after having frequently put up with junk food on the run as a reporter in the Washington bureau from December 1998 to May 2002. While in Washington, he was among the journalists assigned to Capitol Hill and Congress until August 1999, when he began covering the presidential campaign of Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. He subsequently covered the White House for the first eight months of the Bush administration and was, for the next seven months, the Washington-based staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.

During the summer of 1998, Mr. Bruni spent three months as a national correspondent in the newspaper’s San Francisco bureau. Mr. Bruni joined The Times as a metropolitan reporter in August 1995. For three and a half years, he worked on the metropolitan desk and frequently wrote for The Times Magazine, profiling a diverse group of individuals, among them the actress Vanessa Redgrave, the writer David Foster Wallace and the former governor of Massachusetts William Weld. He also wrote many articles for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section and other feature sections of The Times.

In 1996, Mr. Bruni and three colleagues won the George Polk Award for metropolitan reporting for their coverage of the child-abuse death of Elisa Izquierdo.

Before joining The Times, he worked for The Detroit Free Press from 1990 to 1995, where he held a variety of positions. During this period, he spent three months covering the Persian Gulf war and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for “Twisted Love,” a portrait of a convicted child molester. He spent his last year at The Free Press as the movie critic. Before his years in Detroit, he worked as a reporter and writer for The New York Post for a year and a half.

Mr. Bruni is the author of The New York Times best-seller “Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush.” He is also the co-author of “A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church,” which was published in hardcover by Viking in 1993 and in a revised, soft-cover version by HarperCollins in 2002.

Born in White Plains, N.Y., on Oct. 31, 1964, Mr. Bruni received a B.A. degree (Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1986. He received an M.S. degree in journalism, with highest honors, from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1988, graduating second in his class and winning a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.