Rating: 
Summary: Finding the Good Things in the Mixed Buffet
Review: There is a lot to like about this book-- if you can find it! Between layout, verbiage, and sidebars, there is no flow of language at all-- this is simply a huge buffet of interviews roughly (emphasis on "roughly") organized along thematic lines. The text may be interrupted by two of three pages of a topical commentary by another critic or restaurateur; long quotations related to the topic may be found in the margins; thumbnail reviews of some restaurants in some cities may be found in the back. But curiously, for a book that wants to explore the role, place, function, and substance of the food critic in our society, this book fails to offer many examples of "good criticism." For instance, we learn that other critics love the writing of Gael Greene or Ruth Reichl, but we are not given excerpts from their supposedly noteworthy reviews. Instead, what we have is a real mishmash of text that appears to be the result of standard interviews, cut and pasted into wherever the editors feel it fits. That's three stars... as in average. With higher expectations. Oh well, as Johann Killeen of Al Forno in Providence, RI, says, "any publicity is good publicity." True for Al Forno; less so for this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: These two authors make us aware of the little understood process of professional restaurant reviewing. The interviews are honest. I learned a great deal. The presentation is excellent and insightful. If you love food and great restaurants you will certainly enjoy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Well done!
Review: This is no fair! It took me a lifetime to learn all these insights into the restaurant business, and now Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page have put so many of them into an easy-to-read book for any young upstart to read. So much for the school of hard knocks! Well done!
Rating: 
Summary: Entertainment Weekly review: A-
Review: This 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 Dornenburg and 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 in to entropy. At least they haven't resorted to....letter grades. A-
Rating:
Summary: One of the best culinary books of 1998
Review: Zagat may give you the "where" of restaurants, but Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page supply the "who," "what" and "why." A fascinating read from cover to cover.
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