Reviewed by Jessica MacMurray Blaine

A collection of his celebrated GQ columns, along with pieces from a few other magazines, Alan Richman’s Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater is the latest in a gush of food travelogue/memoir. But while it follows a number of one-man-eating-around-the-world volumes penned by luminaries like Calvin Trillin, Jeffrey Steingarten, John Thorne and Anthony Bourdain, it may be the best of the bunch. Richman is insightful, devoid of pretension, funny and often wise.

Although he is often writing about the specifics of one restaurant experience or another, Richman does succeed in pulling together a collection that offers wisdom and insight into weightier topics like family, myth, racism and the nature of celebrity.

Honesty — both his own and that which he demands from the world —is what makes this collection stand out and hold together. “The way I see it, macrobiotics is the art of prolonging life, while veganism is the art of making life not worth prolonging,” he writes while trying to understand evangelist vegans. “Sure, red wine lowers cholesterol, but is that any way to decide on a beverage?” he asks.

He’s fierce in poking holes in the restaurant mystique. “Knock off the ‘day-boat’ routine,” he implores in his “Ten Commandments for Restaurants.” “Sure, like I really believe there’s an armada of fishing boats sailing off every morning at daybreak and returning at dusk, just so every restaurant in American can put day-boat halibut or day-boat cod on its menu.” In the straightforward review, “Alice Doesn’t Cook Here Anymore,” he points out that the place to find celebrity chefs is rarely (or never, in his experience) their nominal restaurants.

Richman, winner of 11 James Beard Awards, both loves and despises restaurants. He skewers the trappings of pretension while celebrating the pinnacles of haute cuisine. In one chapter, he writes a wry valentine to the greasy “joint” that every town should have, while admitting in another that his perfect menu would include truffles in no less than three of eight courses, along with chestnut-flour tagliatelle, steak tartare and a slightly over-the-hill Epoisses.

Throughout, his description is creative and non-fussy. He describes the odor of haggis as having “the mustiness of an old bookstore, the tang of a Turkish spice market and the animality of a butcher shop’s back room.” All he asks of Italy is that there be “a few admirable trattorias among the unheated museums, crumbling amphitheatres and heroic statues with no noses.” Humor is omnipresent. His manifesto asserting the superiority of white wine over red cites the bonus that making white wine keeps Germans distracted, that winos hanging around in vacant lots with stray cats and broken bottles are invariably drinking red, not white, and that watching a sommelier decant red wine is like a bad séance. In his dry piece disavowing cheese courses, Richman begins: “Dinner was fourteen courses, so no one was going hungry.”