by Alan Richman

GQ restaurant critic Richman serves up a sharp, rollicking collection of articles that document his most memorable culinary experiences.

For Richman, reviewing restaurants often involves Mission Impossible-style tactics--making reservations under false names, stealing menus, prying information out of waiters and busboys--but the 11-time James Beard Award winner believes he's up to the task. "I know how to eat as well as any man alive," he says, and he frequently samples his dinner companions' orders even before they have.

He first found his calling as a kid outside Philadelphia, when he tasted a perfect pastrami sandwich at the local Chuckwagon restaurant. Later, as a newspaper sports writer, attracted by the prospect of free food, he began moonlighting for the paper's dining section.

Here, he shares some of the favorite food columns he's written over his career for publications like GQ and Bon Appetit. Included are profiles of the Hamptons, a restaurant graveyard dominated by Billy Joel sightings, and Louis Farrakhan's $5 million Chicago eatery, where, ironically, Richman found himself watching pro golf on the TV in the lounge.

He also recalls his dinner date with Sharon Stone ("For the briefest moment, I was [her] partner, not just a pawn") and his desperate quest to find a celebrity chef--Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse, Rocco DiSpirito, anyone--actually present at his restaurant.

His hardened opinions belie the conversational tone of the book, such as his distaste for vegans, or his feelings about boiled lobster ("an inferior technique popularized by New England seafood shanties").

Richman is a terrific writer, and his short, simple, funny sentences will both engage and surprise readers, even while his restaurant critiques, some now more than a decade old, feel slightly out of place. His prose has the effect of letting readers in on the joke without directly acknowledging it, like when he remembers his delight, as a child, being treated to $1.09 steak dinner specials.