Lonely Planet's Best Places to Eat in Every Country (Lonely Planet Food)

Perfect for the Traveling Foodie!

I received this book as a gift after looking through it at a bookstore. I can understand the reviews saying the organization is a little confusing - maps would have been cool. I enjoyed this book as a conversation piece and just for browsing through. As someone who really enjoys food and really enjoys traveling I find it fun to read about restaurants and cuisine in places I probably won’t ever be able to travel to, or won’t be able to for a while. It’s also fun to look up the restaurants online and read the menus.

To learn more about when my daughter travels

We’ve now given this book to 3 different people who are world travelers & they love it! It’s such a cool idea for the ppl who you think have EVERYTHING but you still want to get them something unique.

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 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 I wonder how quickly the listings will go out of date?For serious foodies, a great present: not practical to take away with you, but good for giving some suggestions for aspirational restaurants.

​​​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.

The book is beautifully bound and the paper quality is very good. There are almost 2,000 delicious restaurants listed.For foodie, it is a must-have course. For normal person, it is also very good to learn about the deliciousness and customs of all parts of the world. The tiger prawns from Burma and the stuffed scallops from Istanbul are so bothersome that people can't help their saliva flow out, head straight to the destination, and feast on them.

Lonely Planet's Best Places to Eat in Every Country (Lonely Planet Food)The reason I got this book is because one of the great pleasures of my life has been travelling abroad, going to restaurants, eating street food and buying and cooking local produce. Circumstances and Covid have prevented me going abroad for about five years and I am not sure when I shall be able to go again, so I got this book as an indulgence, to read about what I am missing and it works brilliantly.However I am pretty sure that me wallowing in nostalgia was not what this book was written for. So, what was it written for? And there you hit the problems.1. It is a large, heavy volume and I cannot see anyone travelling by air or train packing it. It would weigh them down.2. It is not, as yet, on kindle and I could see no plans to put it on.3. It covers every country you can think of. You normally only take guides to the place you’re visiting.4. If it is for research done at home before you travel, it would have been more useful to have it loose leaf in a ring binder so you could extract the relevant pages.So who is it for and what is its purpose?As it is at present formatted, unless you are an armchair gourmet, it is not fit for purpose. Published electronically it would be a valuable resource.