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By Nancy Beardsley
A world winning food writer Alan Richman will go just about anywhere in search of a great meal--from back-road diners in rural America to restaurants atop the skyscrapers of Shanghai. He's recounted his experiences, from the sublime to the awful, in GQ and other magazines. Now he's published a book called Fork It Over, the Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater.
The author credits his passion for good food to his mother, who was renowned for her cheese blintzes and other Jewish specialties. He's been searching for culinary perfection ever since--whether it's sushi in Los Angeles, truffles in France, or pizza in Naples.
But he hasn't always been happy with the results, his journeys have never been in vain-because, for Alan Richman, dining out is about more than food. "When you go into a restaurant, it opens a door to the whole country. There are people there who are serving you, cooking for you, greeting you. Restaurants are a way of getting into a culture that nothing else provides."
In Fork It Over, Alan Richman describes dining adventures that range around the world and over several decades. During a five-day stay in Monte Carlo, he set for himself the task of eating multi-course lunches and dinners at one of the world's finest hotel dining rooms. He journeyed back to Saigon, to take another taste of the food he experienced as an American soldier during the Vietnam War.
He travels to Cuba, where he was struck by how much better foreign tourists eat than the Cuban people. "I arrived in Cuba expecting to find desperation. I came away awed by the patience and loyalty of an incredibly stressed populace. I thought a 62-year-old Cuban woman named Nilsa epitomized the stoicism of the typical Cuban. After I read her a list of everything I'd eaten from the breakfast buffet at the Melia Cohiba Hotel, she laughed without envy and said, 'For me that is food for 15 or 20 days.'"
Alan Richman also travels to Shanghai, where he finds a booming center of international commerce, with an ambitious cuisine to match. "It's filled with these restaurants that seat 1,000 people, 2,000 people. Story after story, room after room, and there may be 700 people working in the restaurants to feed these people. The food is spectacular. That's where I had snake, that's where I had duck. The trouble with the food in Shanghai is that the government wants to make this into an international city, and they've created these sections with international restaurants. I had some Italian food in Shanghai that might be the worst Italian food in the world. But the Chinese food was the best I've ever had in my life."
Closer to home, Alan Richman spent a week sampling the cuisine at Salaam in Chicago, a complex of restaurants run by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. The author finds it ironic that a leader who's been criticized for advocating a divisive brand of black separatism would open a place as public as a restaurant. "He's inviting you into this whole organization of his. The food wasn't so good, I have to say. He was making the common mistake of a young, aspiring restaurateur, trying to do too much at one time instead of having a specific cuisine. But I was very well treated, even though I was almost always the only white person there. And not only that, his famous mosque--there are no whites allowed in the Mosque Maryam--they let me in, and I think I learned a lot about the culture."
Fork It Over takes readers through several decades of food trends in the United States--from the craze for Polynesian restaurants in the 1960s to the more recent interest in vegan cuisine, which avoids not only meat but animal byproducts like milk and eggs.
注释：
recount 叙述
sublime 极好的
blintze 薄饼卷
culinary 烹调的
Monte Carlo 蒙特卡洛（位于摩纳哥）
Saigon 西贡（前南越首都）
desperation 绝望
ambitious 雄心勃勃的
mosque 清真寺
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