Lonely Planet's Best Places to Eat in Every Country Hardcover – Illustrated, 14 May 2021

Perfect for the Traveling Foodie!

This is a real brick of a book. It’s hardcover, printed on quality paper and at over 600pp, it’s a weight! You’re not going to be popping this in your backpack or holiday luggage.That said, it’s a real cracker of a book and ideal for armchair travel around the world. With this on your knee and a drink of choice in your hand, you could be anywhere in the world in a few minutes. It’s subjective, of course, as any ‘best’ is entirely personal. But that doesn’t matter because it’s a real taster for food and places. It’s packed with colour photos. In addition to restaurant guides, there’s advice on tipping, cost, speciality dishes and a great deal of information about the food favourites of every country. It’s very easy to navigate and each country has numerous selections from many towns. There’s information about regional areas and food and it’s certainly a starter for long listing perhaps specific eateries or areas that you may think of visiting.It’s truly comprehensive and I’m hard put to find an area of the world not covered. This is a book to dip into and enjoy at leisure. It’s an eclectic collection, informed, vibrant and very readable. I love it.

This is the kind of reference book that I love! At 600 pages, it covers the globe. Clearly, a weighty tome like this isn’t going to list places to eat town by town, so what you get is a few carefully chosen places in each country with a geographical variance by city or region. There’s a mixed choice too, from small bakeries to classy restaurants to where to get the best ice cream; these are places that have been hand selected for their quality. What I especially like about this book are the side panels that advise on what the must-try delicacies are in each country. You also get coffee, wine and cocktail suggestions alongside places that serve them. Each place has a £ rating for price in the traditional manner and tipping advice.Nicely illustrated with both colour photographs and illustrations this book is a treasure trove of delicious food. It is a sampler for gastronomic places to start in unfamiliar countries. Or just browse through, planning you trip around some of the world’s notable eateries, supplementing these choices with other recommendations. This is not a book you’ll take away with you – there are other, more detailed books for that, or even online sources, but as a way to gastronomically wander through the world, it is a source of pleasure and mouth- watering delight.

​​​This is, in essence, "restaurant porn" - it reads as if it could have been written by Jim Bowen (Bullseye reference for the older readers), whose catch phrase was "and here's what you could have won".If you're missing travel, and missing eating out, then this is a great book for dipping into, and I suspect that you are the ideal target audience for the book. It comes across as a thick, but small scale, coffee table book with no real organisation to it and as such it is ideal for picking up, dipping into for two minutes, then putting down again.For indepth reasearch for places to eat when going somewhere, or for places to go if there's a particular cuisine that you fancy indulging in, then this isn't really the book for you. It's too heavy to throw in your bag when you're off on a trip, so it isn't one that you'll be using as a guide book while away.When I was a lad, we had a small house with four children and two parents, and the only place where my Dad could get any peace and quiet was in the smallest room. He used to spend hours in there reading books and newspapers, and this would, for him, have been the ideal "toilet book". That's a bit of a niche audience though, so I can only give the book four stars - it's a bit haphazard for everybody else.

This is a pretty ambitious book, with restaurant listings for every (and I mean every!) country in the world. Inevitably, there is not much space for each country and so the listings are relatively few, but they do seem to try to cover a range of eateries, from mid-range to high-end. I wonder how quickly the listings will go out of date?For serious foodies, a great present: not practical to take away with you, but good for giving some suggestions for aspirational restaurants.