Venetian Taste

This visually striking cookbook floats tuna carpaccio in an eddy of Venetian waters, courtesy of photographer Peter Pioppo. And while it's a truism that many lavishly illustrated cookbooks are knockouts, here this bears repeating. The volume's outstanding design places descriptive text squarely on the page, provides photos as off-center attractions that will detain and recipes stacked up in sidebars. Full-page color photos are often so artfully composed that one can forget they concern food at all. To read is to travel among enviable dinner tables, with glances cast at Venetian canals and fruit stalls, and pauses as readers may try to imagine whether they could produce equivalent results with pumpkin gnocchi, polenta with wild mushrooms or tuna ravioli with ginger. In most cases, the answer is yes-though perhaps with less fastidiously styled panache. Antonucci is the chef of Remi, the New York restaurant; Tihany is co-proprietor of the same, and of its cousins in Mexico City, Tel Aviv and elsewhere; Fabricant (Pleasure of the Table) is a New York Times writer. (Oct.)