When Jeffrey Chodorow’s plane landed on the Las Vegas tarmac last Wednesday afternoon, 52 text messages lit up his cell phone, and his frantic publicist hustled him to a television studio for damage control with a live interview on CNBC.

The restaurateur had spent close to $40,000 for a full-page advertisement in the Dining In, Dining Out section of the New York Times, where he published an open letter to the editor rebutting what he called a biased zero-star review of his pricey Midtown steakhouse, Kobe Club. He painted himself as a victim of the press without recourse to defend himself and announced he would launch a blog, where he plans to respond to “an increasingly negative, downright nasty climate that has surfaced in the world of restaurant journalism.”

The 1,138-word advertisement had stirred up a firestorm back in New York. The popular food blog Eater.com dedicated fulltime coverage to “Chodogate,” and its traffic increased by about 35%, according to its editor, Benjamin Leventhal. From the daily tabloids to the weekly glossies, press outlets in New York City were eager to document Mr. Chodorow’s war with his critics.

Another New York restaurateur, Drew Nieporent, whose Myriad Restaurant Group owns restaurants including Nobu and Tribeca Grill, defended Mr. Chodorow’s frustration with the state of food criticism. “My experience has been that food critics don’t even want to talk to us anymore,” he said. “If they want to know if it was basil or cilantro, they won’t even ask us. They come up with their own ideas, which can be totally inaccurate.”

Food critics generally fell on Mr. Bruni’s side. “I assure you that if a 3-year-old gave Chodorow three ‘goo goos,’ he’d think that baby had a really discerning palate,” a former food critic for the Times, Mimi Sheraton, said. “Restaurateurs are always saying critics should have certification, but what credentials do we demand of someone who opens a restaurant?”

“Happy is a relative concept, but I would do it again,” Mr. Chodorow told The New York Sun, when asked if he was pleased with the publicity his advertisement received. “I was very emotional about this whole thing. It’s not personal against Bruni. I don’t feel the review process is a fair process.”

In his February 7 review, Mr. Bruni wrote that Kobe Club felt “like a cynical stab at exploiting the current mania for steakhouse in Manhattan by contriving one with an especially costly conceit and more gimmicks than all of the others combined.”

Last week, Mr. Chodorow swore that he would ban Mr. Bruni from his restaurants in the future, but as passions have cooled, he said yesterday that it probably won’t be the case. “I have no idea what I’ll do,” he said.

Mr. Bruni told The New York Sun last week that he held no personal grudge against Mr. Chodorow, and that his review was “honest, if inevitably subjective.”

Mr. Chodorow, who turns 57 on Friday, stumbled into the restaurant business in 1986 while on a trip to Santa Monica, where he was to seal the deal on the purchase of the New England Patriots. The football deal fell through, but his restaurants have thrived. He owns 22, including Asia de Cuba and his first eatery, China Grill. His next venture, Wild Salmon, is slated to open in Midtown in April.

His passion for food began at a young age. After his father died, when Mr. Chodorow was an infant, Mr. Chodorow’s mother moved to Miami from New York to live with her sister and work as a manicurist. “She couldn’t afford babysitters, so when she dated, she took me along,” Mr. Chodorow recalled. “The boyfriends wanted to impress me, so my exposure to food was at an early age. I went to the best restaurants in Miami.” Although he made his first millions in commercial real estate development, the Wharton Business School alumnus said that he doesn’t fit the stereotype of the jet-setting restaurateur more interested in money than food: “I was a foodie before the word ‘foodie’ was even a word.”

Mr. Chodorow today is married with two college-aged children of his own. He has three primary residences: in Philadelphia, Miami, and Manhattan. He heads a family of restaurants under the umbrella of his China Grill Management, which brings in $250 million annually under a logo of chopsticks clutching the globe. He also profits from a several department store leases he owns.

Mr. Chodorow’s high-rent, high-volume restaurants boast flashy themes and ornate interiors. At Kobe Club, several thousand samurai swords dangle ominously from the ceiling, and the dining room features low lights, lots of leather, and brick walls painted black. Customers at Asia de Cuba dine in front of a large, bright painting of a waterfall.

His style sometimes doesn’t suit purists. Mr. Chodorow’s first choice for head chef, Simile Sushi’s Joshua DeChellis, backed out of the Kobe Club venture when he saw that Mr. Chodorow’s vision was not for an authentically Japanese menu. “Taste is a subjective thing,” Mr. DeChellis said yesterday. “He just wanted something different than what I had in mind.”

The advertisement in the Times was not the first instance when Mr. Chodorow has exposed himself to public scrutiny. He starred on the NBC reality television show “The Restaurant” in 2003, which documented the opening of Rocco’s on 22nd Street, with chef Rocco DiSpirito. That restaurant, financed by Mr. Chodorow, closed in 2004. Mr. Chodorow was depicted as Mr. DiSpirito’s nemesis, and eventually terminated his partnership with the chef in the Supreme Court of the State of New York.

“You pick and choose what you want to show on reality television,” Mr. Chodorow said. “They tended to show mostly the bad.” The next restaurant he opened in the 22nd Street space, Caviar & Banana, also closed, as did Mix, his first try in the space currently occupied by Kobe Club.

“He’s entitled to defend his business,” Mr. Nieporent said, deploring the fact that food critics take mogul restaurateurs less seriously than chefs who run just one establishment. “It should be the reverse,” Mr. Nieporent said. “Martin Scorsese makes good movies, and no one thinks, ‘Oh, do we have to see Leo in another movie?’ They think the new one should be great. It should be the same for restaurants.”

“I don’t envy Bruni,” Ms. Sheraton said. “If he gives the next restaurant a tough review, people will say he’s mad. If he gives a nice review, it will look like he caved. And he can’t recuse himself, because then everyone would take out an ad and think the Times would send a different critic.”