cover image Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater

Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater

Alan Richman. HarperCollins Publishers, $24.95 (324pp) ISBN 978-0-06-058629-4

As GQ's longtime food critic and an 11-time James Beard Award winner, Richman has eaten a lot of fancy food. But the best essays in this collection--culled mainly from his work for magazines--don't speak of foie gras or truffles. The accounts of Richman's escapades eating at places like Alain Ducasse's three Michelin-starred Le Louis XV, and even his reminiscences of meals at dives like the Pantry in Los Angeles, become repetitive when grouped together. The two standouts are the essays about Richman's parents. In""A Mother's Knishes,"" he achieves the quasi-miraculous feat of finding something fresh to say about a food-crazed Jewish mother, in this case by recounting her loss of identity as she descends into senility and loses her culinary skills. The second, the hilarious""Miami Weiss,"" investigates the""Early Bird"" tradition of South Florida. When the doors open at 5 p.m. at the Fort Lauderdale restaurant Fifteenth Street Fisheries, Richman writes,""It's a sort of Geriatric Olympics."" The essays are arranged in menu-like fashion under such headings as""Appetizers,""""Entrees,"" etc. The""Palate Cleansers"" are unsatisfactory, brief pieces, with titles like""Ten Commandments for Diners,"" which come off as condescending. Also, Richman's attitude toward women is archaic to say the least (""she was a woman who knew how to eat like a man""), which may turn off a good number of readers. Agent, Kathy Robbins.