High Eateries: A Gastronomic Tour of the Finest Ingesting areas You Must Strive

★★★★★ Excellent read for the oyster enthusiast. Great book for anyone who truly enjoys and adores oyster.Would have been more enjoyable and easier to read if it had been published using a sans serif font.

★★★★★ this was a gift for my dad and he LOVED it. its packed with very cool information and. this was a gift for my dad and he LOVED it. its packed with very cool information and recipes. I gave it to him for christmas and now I want one myself so I may just do that 🙂

★★★★☆ Who would ever know there's so much history about the oyster. My husband liked this as a gift. He loves to eat oysters. I didn't really buy it for the recipes, but it is an added bonus. Wish I could find a similar book on the Maryland Crab...

★★★★★ Perfect little coffee table book. Simply perfect! Very in style right now!

★★★★★ Great book. This book is awesome with a bunch of neat history and recipes throughout.

★★★★★ So awesome I bought two. Great and interesting book! Bought another as a gift!

★★★★★ Five Stars. a wonderful book....

★★★★★ Five Stars. great read

★★★★★ Book came tightly sealed and in perfect condition as advertised! Highly recommend

★★★★★ A beautiful and extremely well-researched book; however, please note that much of it appears to be a re-working of Drew Smith's 2010 book "Oyster A World History" with recipes added in case, like me, you already own that. That said, I am thoroughly enjoying reading it again in the revised form

★★★★★ Love it.

★★★★★ Good

★★★☆☆ enjoyed reading it.

★★★★★ One of the most delightful books. The greatest set of stories on food exploration. The writing style is absolutely fine and entertaining while the subjects are covered very thoroughly, but with enough scepticism to be of scientific value.One of the most fun activities I had away from a table in my life.

★★★★★ The Omnivore's Specialist. Jeffrey Steingarten is the grumpy judge on Iron Chef America (or was, about 5 years ago. You will see him in reruns). It was in the chocolate challenge of an episode a couple of years ago, when he said he would give all his points to the chef who could just made a perfect chocolate ice cream, that I understood him. I get you, Jeffrey Steingarten! I even wonder if the falderal of the show embarrasses him a little, though he sometimes says very nice things about the improbable concoctions put in front of him. I call into the other room to my husband, "I think this one's going to win. The grumpy guy likes his food better." And my husband comes in to see this for himself.Mr. Steingarten has an imperturbable gravitas on the panel, and does deliver his opinions ungarnished with self-deprecation, which tends to rub third-tier show biz types the wrong way. Once a former Dancing With the Stars actress rounded on him hotly because he didn't like something she thought was wonderful. He took it with the placid aplomb of an English Mastiff accosted by an anxious Pomerianian. He isn't arrogant. I know that because I read his book. A man is not arrogant who buys ten orders of MacDonald's French fries to try out 33 kinds of ketchup. Then confesses it was too much food and he and his wife got mixed up. And in the end they decided their favorite ketchup might not be the spiciest, but with fries, "a marriage made in heaven." If he acts as if he knows he's right, it's because he knows he's right. How can you not like a know-all who goes to all that trouble to be sure?The Man Who Ate Everything is a collection of essays packed with his musings, research, recipes, and travels in quest of culinary perfection. His thing is to search out the experts and recipes, then do it at home. But, "Cesare [his Italian informant] never warned me about making pasta near an open drawer." His crater of flour was breached and twenty egg yolks surged across the table "like molten lava rolling over a Hawaiian housing development," into the silverware drawer. Cooking methods are detailed and the physics behind certain techniques are explained. What an interdisciplinist he is, if that's a word. I appreciated the history lessons, as well as the attention to biology (I am a wildlife ecologist). He reasonably concludes that food phobias make no sense, because we are omnivores, and gets rid of most of his through determined exposure to the hated items, because he wants to be a fair and liberal food critic who eats everything.He can't write without being funny, but beneath it he's always informed. Mr. Steingarten gets it right about plants' making poisons, and why. Boil that spinach and throw away the water, People. He is also right that we have been hoodwinked into believing that all fat is bad. I notice the dairy section of my grocery store is still loaded with awful Fat Free cheese, sour cream, half-and-half (half of what and what?); and the number of crappy Fat Free salad dressings still crowding the shelves is depressing. I was loading my cart with avocados when a woman next to me sighed and said she loves avocados, too, but(as if surprised I was still alive), "All those fatty acids!" The section Why Aren't the French Dropping Like Flies? should be required reading for anyone with a family history of heart disease.There's a lot of fun here. He goes on a new French diet that was then all the rage (Atkins, South Beach, etc. were later knock-offs), loses 7 lbs after a month of hilarious obsessing about the number on the scales (he purchases three for comparison), but remains lovably unconverted and returns to "pies, pierogi, pistachios, pizza, popcorn potatoes, puff pastry--and that only covers the P's." He enrolls in waiters school and learns how to trick people into spending more than they intended. He travels to Memphis to judge a barbecue competition and is so in love with the winning ribs that he brings some home, and stoically stops himself from devouring them all before his wife comes home from work--his sensuous description of the meat should be rated PG-13, at least. He says I have been making mashed potatoes the wrong way, with Grandmom's hand masher. But in my defense, Mr. Steingarten's way is not to mash them at all, so I think he shouldn't call them mashed. But I can't wait to try his ketchup recipe.Just a warning: Don't try to read too much in one sitting, no matter how much you're enjoying it. I was skimming around sampling this and that, and had already read a lot--too much, I guess--by the time I got to Primal Bread. I should have been riveted. I actually kept starter once. My donor just waved her hands when I asked where she got it. "Oh, the yeasts just naturally occur, you know. Every kitchen has them." Now I see why it never tasted very good. But my eyes were glazing over and I put the book down. Keep portion size small.I keep very few books. But this one, I will. I already ordered It Must Have Been Something I Ate, and I wish there were others. The Man Who Ate Everything is funny, intelligent, informed. Just like Mr. Steingarten.

★★★★☆ A good read but gets boring once in a while due to unwanted statistics. This book was a refreshing read about the author's (who is a lawyer turned Vogue food critic) culinary journeys around the world. He describes everything from the Southern barbecue to Venitian seafood with such delicious adjectives, you feel like hopping on a flight right then and eat that simple Italian pasta he is raving about or experience the exotic Korean Wagyu he claims is nothing like normal beef. Loved his witty remarks and all the jokes he makes on his wife's expense! I came to know so many amazing things about the world of food (which I'll surely toss around in conversations when I want to seem a food know-it-all! 😀 ) and like all people who like reading about food, I loved reading about all the ways the meat gets cooked in its own juices and herbs that impart their flavor to it and pies that symbolize America and all the science behind cakes and gluten and what not. But here's what bored me - the statistics. In the beginning, he seems to meander off citing statistics in a detailed, but drab manner, and that is when I started yawning. When I realized that this is happening again and again, I started skipping whole paragraphs that contained statistics. He stops doing this almost halfway through the book. I was also not interested in most of the recipes that are there in the book, so I skipped over them as well, but I definitely appreciate all the steps that he takes to simplify conventional recipes and describes the what-no-to-do stages in great detail. All in all, a good read without the statistics.

★★★★★ A Leading Contemporary Culinary Essayist. Great Read. `The Man Who Ate Everything' is written by Jeffrey Steingarten, credited with being the food critic for `Vogue' magazine, belongs to a very exclusive club of American culinary columnists whose present leading light is James Villas and whose biggest star was M.F.K. Fisher. Oddly, I always had trouble appreciating Fisher's writing, while I simply can't get enough of either Villas or Steingarten. And, of these two, I am leaning to Steingarten if anyone asked me for a `good book on food'.Steingarten's greatest strength as a writer to the amateur foodie is his ability to put himself in our position vis-à-vis the experts. He never pictures himself as an expert like Harold McGee on food science or Mario Batali on Italian cuisine or Nick Malgieri on baking or even like gifted neophyte Alton Brown on cooking technique. Unlike these professionals and teachers, Steingarten's shtick is how he gets there, not what he as learned after arriving. He is the culinary everyman's surrogate who can travel to Venice to visit Marcella Hazan for an education in cooking and eating Venetian seafood and have cooking expert Marian Cunningham fly in to teach him how to make a perfect piecrust.Steingarten's introduction which gives an explanation of the book's title makes one seriously wonder what our dear reporter did before he was tapped to write on food for `Vogue'. His list of culinary aversions could fill several major cookbooks, and have. One wonders if Steingarten had any food related assignment before he embarked on reforming his tastes to fit his `Vogue' assignment. While I sometimes fear that my sense of taste is remarkably dull compared to those of talented chefs, my compensation is that there is literally nothing I will not eat and there are very few things I will avoid. In contrast, pre-Vogue Steingarten had aversions to kimchi, dill, swordfish, anchovies, miso, falafel, clams, and all Greek food. The introductory essay is the story of how Steingarten overcame all of these aversions except to the one for eating insects.This first essay is a perfect exemplary of Steingarten's style. It may have been easier to say these are the aversions he overcame, but it is much more fun to describe how he overcame them. This is not to say that the book is all about the tourist to the banal. Steingarten is well prepared for most of these trips and we, along with the author, learn much in the course of his trials and errors.While this is not a book about food science a la Robert Wolke's `What Einstein Told His Chef', there is a lot of scientific method afoot in many of the essays. My favorite is Steingarten's excursion into the world of the perfect piecrust. As dedicated `Good Eats' fans know from Alton's episode on pie crusts, the building of the perfect pie crust involves resolving two contrary properties, flakiness and tenderness while doing battle with properties of wheat flour gluten which work so well when creating bread, but which, it is said, cause all sorts of undesirable characteristics in pie crusts, known to the French as `pate brisee'. Before expert Cunningham flies in from California, Steingarten surveys the entire body of writing in English on what makes a good pie crust and comes up with a perfect procedure involving a whiz of the flour in a food processor with half the shortening followed by a careful folding in of the remaining shortening and a hint of water to bring everything together. The result is a disaster.The lesson from this attempt is that that villain gluten is not so irrelevant to a pastry crust as some writers would have you believe. When Madame Cunningham arrives on the scene, she whips up a dandy piecrust in about as much time as it may take you to write about it. Ms. Cunningham then flies off before Herr Steingarten has gotten everything about her technique down on paper. This leads to many transcontinental telephone calls while our Jeffrey perfects his fingering with the dough and gets everything down in black and white. The really ironic outcome of this exercise and the resulting essay is that Steingarten's description of the complete procedure takes SEVEN (7) full pages. And, that is with a recipe using shortening rather than my preferred butter. I may not follow his procedure, but I certainly enjoyed his journey needed to get him to that result.Like Villas, it is quite likely that you will find much in Steingarten's writing with which to disagree. This is part of the fun. For example, he can find little to like about roasted turkey, the national American holiday meal. Since `Gourmet' and `Bon Appetit' and Nigella Lawson (among others) are still cooking up new recipes for the maligned bird, I suspect Steingarten has not talked anyone out of eating their gigantic poultry, but it is certainly fun listening to him rant about it and, as Ms. Lawson so aptly points out, tradition may be as much or more important than the turkey's culinary virtues.As we are approaching the dark evenings of winter, I definitely recommend this book as a classic of American culinary writing. It is our Yankee answer to B'rer Villas' writing about food from the Southern perspective. As an essayist, Steingarten has the eye and mind of Stephen Jay Gould and the wit and wordsmithing (and similarly strong prejudices) of H. L. Menchen, my two favorite American essayists.Highly recommended.

★★★★★ divertido y facil de leer. Evidentemente tiene un punto de humor que lo vuelve distendido y pone al alcance del lector aspectos tecnicos de la gastronomia.

★★★★★ I have a fondness for food memoirs, and one in particular for acerbic Vogue magazine writer, Jeffrey Steingarten. The Man Who Ate Everything is the first book by the lawyer turned critic and chronicles his forays into cooking and nutrition. Aside from being witty and articulate, Steingarten is possessed of immense curiosity. He is more than willing to comb New York and Paris (and parts beyond) for a new ingredient or flavor. And he is no ordinary voyeur; lugging dozens of ingredients back to his apartment to make the perfect Brioche or whatever currently appeals. He eschews political correctness and embraces all forms of experimentation. If there is a flaw in this book it's his reviews of nutrition science; reminding us that the latest developments from twenty-five years ago have been revised and rejected a half dozen times since. Perhaps food writers need to focus on the flavor and ingredients and allow the nutritionists to do their thing elsewhere. Highly recommended for lovers of food, good writing and dark kitchen based experiments.

★★★★★ Fascinating book and you don't have to be a foodie to enjoy it! Very pleased!

★★★☆☆ Ce petit recueil de différentes chroniques est un bon petit bouquin comme seuls les anglo-saxons savent le faire, documenté, écrit avec humour et rempli de curiosité. Les sujets sont variés, peut-être au point d'une trop grande dispersion, mais cela tient à fait qu'ils s'agit de chroniques écrites à différents moments. Les sujets abordés sont un mélange de recettes de cuisines, d'anthropologie de la cuisine et de l'alimentation, de science appliquée à la gastronomie et d'avis de consommateur sur les différents aliments.Du coté du moins, les articles sont un peu datés, remontant presque tous aux années 1990-2000, donc parfois un peu dépassés (particulièrement les adresses de restaurants) très américano-centrés, particulièrementen ce qui concerne des aliments qui ne sont pas disponibles en Europe.En résumé, une lecture agréable, instructive mais parfois peu accessible sur certains points à qui n'a pas vécu voici 20 ans aux état-unis.

★★★★★ Me he reído mucho leyendo las aventuras de Stengarten en la cocina, especialemente el capitulo en el que intenta crear el agua perfecta. Es un hombre que sabe trasmitir su pasión casi obsesiva por la comida. Lo recomiendo.