Review: Frommer's 500 Placesfor Food & Wine Lovers

Damn! Why didn't this book exist five years ago - or ten? I used to travel a lot for both business and recreational reasons. Each trip, whether business or fun, was preceded by lengthy internet sessions as I attempted to decide where to eat and what (food-wise) to visit. A trip to New York required a stop at Zabars, Philadelphia meant Pat's King of Steaks, and London wouldn't be London without a visit to Harrods.

But such trips were often a crap shoot. Two weeks in Spain or Italy might justify a half dozen guide books and a month of research, but an extra day in Tuscon didn't.justify such an effort. So I rolled the dice. Not a bad choice, but not an ideal choice because I hated the idea of missing a restaurant, farmers' market, brewery, or vineyard I simply didn't know about. So when I got an opportunity to review Frommer's 500 Places for Food & Wine Lovers I jumped at it.

The book was compiled by Holly Hughes, the editor of the Best Food Writing series of books and it is exhaustive. In it's nearly 500 pages of extremely fine print (you may need reading glasses to use it) it covers restaurants, wineries, farmer's markets, tea and coffee houses, and almost anything else you can imagine related to food and wine. Specific places include Zabars, Pat's, and Harrods as well as far more obscure locations like The Puffin Place in Iceland, Bedell Cellars in Cutchogue, New York and Filadelfia Coffee in Guatamala.

The descriptions of places I have been, such as The Varsity in Atlanta, are fairly accurate so I would assume the others are as well. And just the sheer number of places discussed makes the book worth getting - or would if my traveling days weren't pretty much over with.

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