The Book of Eating: Adventures in Professional Gluttony

A wildly hilarious and irreverent memoir of a globe-trotting life lived meal-to-meal by one of our most influential and respected food critics

As the son of a diplomat growing up in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, Adam Platt didn’t have the chance to become a picky eater. Living, traveling, and eating in some of the most far-flung locations around the world, he developed an eclectic palate and a nuanced understanding of cultures and cuisines that led to some revelations which would prove important in his future career as a food critic. In Tokyo, for instance—“a kind of paradise for nose-to-tail cooking”—he learned that “if you’re interested in telling a story, a hair-raisingly bad meal is much better than a good one."

From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, re-tracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Providing a glimpse into a life that has intertwined food and travel in exciting and unexpected ways, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age of a voracious eater and his eventual ascension to become, as he puts it, “a professional glutton.”

Adam Platt was the chief restaurant critic and professional glutton in residence for New York magazine for twenty-three years. During the course of a peripatetic, well-traveled career in the magazine business, Platt has contributed to many publications as a contract writer and staffer, including Esquire, The New York Observer, Condé Nast Traveler, and The New Yorker. He won the James Beard Foundation Award for Restaurant Reviews in 2009 and is the author of The Book of Eating. Adam lives in Greenwich Village with his two pizza-loving daughters.