London food critic Jay Rayner’s The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner is part foodie text and part travelogue. Rayner travels to major centers of food and money, not always in that order, to sample the highest of high-end restaurants. He heads to Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, New York, Paris, and his home town, London.

Fans of the exquisitely turned, often caustic descriptive phrase will find much to savor here. For the first half of the book, Rayner delivers everything I want in travel writing: he assures me that places I won’t be going to are also places I would never want to go to. This does not apply to New York or London, which I’ve been to and like. Otherwise unable to successfully portray Paris as a hellish wasteland, he manfully attempts to render it unendurable with a high-end imitation of Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me.

For a surprising number of the over-the-top restaurant experiences, he similarly describes the meals as ones I do not want to eat, which is definitely an added bonus. Only a couple of the spots he describes induced out-of-reach fantasies of jetting about the world dropping four figures for a meal.

If you want this to be a gaming resource, you could do worse than to use the astounding details of Moscow, Dubai and to a lesser extent Tokyo and Vegas as background detail for a high-rolling espionage campaign. That Russian restaurant with the sturgeon swimming underneath its glass floors surely has to become the setting for a Feng Shui shoot-out.

This book is not to be confused with the equally wonderful The Man Who Ate Everything, by Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten which was recommended to me by (name drop alert) Jack Vance, back when we spoke about the Dying Earth roleplaying game. That book is an experiential tour through the science and gastronomy of various ingredients, including a smatter of restaurant talk and plenty of dedicated kitchen experimentation.

Tags: book hut, dying earth, feng shui, food, gaming hut, geography

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