Dining Out: Secrets from America's Leading Critics, Chefs, and Restauranteurs

Dining Out: Secrets from America's Leading Critics, Chefs, and Restauranteurs is your entree into the tense, bitchy world of the committed ''foodie,'' in which top critics are unmasked as quite average Joes and Jills who (guiltily) lucked into their jobs and for whom top chefs must bow and scrape more furiously than ever. Read all of Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page's obsessive, Zagat-busting report on the friction between America's restaurant biz and its press and you risk a pleasant but debilitating food coma. These are tough times, with truffle oil seeping into the hinterlands and the star system falling into entropy. At least they haven't resorted to...letter grades. A-