I've had the happy experience this week of living every spare moment inside Steven Shaw's new book Turning the Tables: Restaurants From the Inside Out.

It's one of those think pieces that actually makes you think, a book on the art of cuisine that artfully covers a wide international landscape yet brings it home in every chapter.

I was looking for a quick way to summarize Turning the Tables when I came across this semi-clever line in the back of the book, under Additional Sources of Food and Dining Information:

"Reading about food and dining isn't as fun as actually eating in restaurants, but it's a lot cheaper."

Shaw is a foodie, a food junkie, a fan of cuisine, an expert on the dining experience. He also is a print journalist and co-founder of the eGullet.org website ("Read, Chew, Discuss"), a place for people to talk food and dining.

His goal in Turning the Tables is "to take you on an insider's guided tour of the world of restaurant dining from farm to table and from the birth of a restaurant concept through opening day and beyond."

Other books have exposed the farcical and dangerous back sides of restaurant life, notably Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour. That's the chef's point of view. Waitresses have written books, too. The book I like best in that genre is Debra Ginsberg's 2001 memoir Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress.

Shaw's small hardcover book is shaped like a menu -- tall and skinny. In it he tells the reader how to bond with a sushi chef, make any kind of restaurant reservations, deal with waitstaff, sniff out excellent and below par restaurants, how to understand the entire and somewhat hidden process that ends with delicious food on your plate.

He interviews chefs, visits artisanal farms and shellfish nurseries. He works in blazing hot kitchens, and stands around in a freezing meat locker to have a newly invented cut of veal demonstrated by the butcher who invented it.

He discusses tipping (necessary evil, but he doesn't like it) and the myth that VIPs get different food than you and I. (Sometimes they do, but not often. By the time you order your meal at a fine restaurant most of it has already been prepared. There's only so much a kitchen can do to impress a reviewer or you, the movie star. Mostly they pile on extra food, send out their best waiters, and comp courses. But restaurants cannot magically change the food for one famous person. At least that's Shaw's learned conclusion.)

Shaw discusses the concept of "authenticity" ("in the food world the authenticity police are everywhere these days") and the whole concept of restaurant reviews.

"Where should we go for dinner?"
"Oh, anywhere you like. I don't really care."
"Okay, how about Italian?"
"No, I don't feel like Italian."

Shaw notes "today we have an unprecedented amount of information available to us about everything, including restaurants. The challenge is not finding out about restaurants, but, rather, filtering out the noise and knowing which sources to trust."

He distrusts the ubiquitous Zagat guides, in which restaurants throughout the country are reviewed solely by the ordinary citizens who eat in them.

"It's as if the editors of Consumer Reports were to declare that their patient, meticulous, objective, and very expensive testing of air conditioners and washing machines actually resulted in a less accurate product guide than one based solely on the random and self-selected reports of buyers..." he writes.

Shaw says "It is a simple but distorting truth that people tend to prefer the restaurants they already frequent." Zagat, according to Shaw, is not the place to discover the new and daring venture. "Those who continue to rate a place are, disproportionately, its admirers -- fans -- while the opinions of detractors go unrecorded."

There's much more in Turning the Tables. Reading this book will make you self-conscious next time you step into a good restaurant. It also will make you more confident, and help you better appreciate and enjoy the food and wine that's placed before you.

Aired Sunday August 21, 2005 at 10:55 am and Monday August 22, 2005 at 8:40 am

Orders/Information:

Turning the Tables: Restaurants From the Inside Out by Steven A. Shaw. HarperCollins hardcover $24.95. ISBN 0060737808.

The EGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters is awaiting your electronic inspection at www.egullet.org and http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=home

Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg. HarperCollins paperback $13. ISBN 0060932813.

From the publisher: "A veteran waitress dishes up a spicy and robust account of life as it really exists behind kitchen doors. Part memoir, part social commentary, part guide to how to behave when dining out, Debra Ginsberg's book takes readers on her twenty-year journey as a waitress at a soap-operatic Italian restaurant, an exclusive five-star dining club, the dingiest of diners, and more...."

For a view of life in the New York Times restaurant reviewer's spot, take a look at Ruth Reichl's amusing memoir Garlic & Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise. Penguin hardcover $24.95. ISBN 1594200319.

Shaw writes, "I have long felt the that the emphasis on anonymity and distance in restaurant reviewing establishes a poor dynamic between those constituencies (consumers and the dining industry)."