Dining guides
“The Historic Shops & Restaurants of New York”
(The Little Bookroom; $14.95)
Judging from the title, you’d expect this little book to be about New York’s shopping and dining institutions. Not so! It’s a jewel box that yields the gems of a bygone era, polished afresh. It’s a treasury of cafes, frame shops, fishmongers, hardware stores, Jewish delis, stationers and gourmet shops without which New York would not be New York. It’s a long-overdue thank-you note to the immigrants whose pushcart businesses grew to become the city’s living landmarks. Measuring a little over 4-by-6 inches, this gift-worthy hardcover is thicker than a Porterhouse from Delmonico’s, which, by the way, got its start when a pair of Swiss immigrants determined that America of the 1820s was a culinary wasteland. The six-table sweets shop they opened would go on to invent baked Alaska and coin lobster a la Newberg, the latter under not altogether honest means. Other juicy gossip here: Al Capone stocked his library with books from Weitz, Weitz & Coleman. Sarah Bernhardt always used the Cucumber Cold Cream from Caswell-Massey apothecary shop. Tiffany & Co. was located at Broadway and Broome when Abraham Lincoln bought pearls for the wife. And it wouldn’t be a proper New Yorker’s book if it didn’t give savvy shopping advice–you simply must buy your ribbons at Hyman Hendler–or do some good, old-fashioned bragging, such as: Capitol Fishing Tackle Company has the largest assortment of said stuff in the Northeast, and Lombardi’s Pizza, which still cooks its pies in a coal oven, may have been the first pizza parlor in the country. (ISBN 1-892145-15-4)
“The Rough Guide to New York City Restaurants”
(Rough Guides; $14.95)
Any guide to New York can tell you the chi-chi places to dine, the names that drip diamonds: Alain Ducasse, Daniel, Jean Georges, Lespinasse. Any guide can, but this one chooses not to. Rough Guides appears to revel in leaving those listings to the Mobils and Zagats and AAAs of this world. Here, you’ll find another sort of name-dropping. How about Hell’s Kitchen in Midtown West for Mexican, Cho Dang Gol in the Garment District for Korean or Knickerbocker Bar & Grill in the Village for whatever? And how about whereas many a dining guide seems never to have heard of the term “breakfast,” this one names five breakfast spots on its best-of list at the front of the book? Chatty restaurant descriptions are divided by neighborhood. Each neighborhood is introduced with an easy-to-read map that locates restaurants among well-known landmarks–most helpful, since you probably won’t be taking the Waldorf-Astoria’s limo to most of these places. Thus we see that the cow-themed Good Enough To Eat, in the Upper West Side, is two blocks off Central Park, that it opens at 9 on weekends only to be crowded eight minutes later with young families and morning-after mopers, and, most importantly, that it’s one place that understands how nothing but good can come after a morning begun in front of a stack of blueberry pancakes. The guide doesn’t stop at Manhattan but also recommends restaurants in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. And it packs it all into 446 fun-to-browse pages measuring 4-by-6 inches. (ISBN 1-85828-857-6)
Travel narratives
“Bill Bryson’s African Diary”
(Broadway Books: $12)
Author and humorist Bill Bryson has a way of taking his Iowa upbringing with him everywhere he goes. When he arrives in Kenya, the CARE worker who greets him at the Nairobi airport asks, “Have you ever eaten a camel?” Answers Bryson: “Only in my junior high school cafeteria, and they called it lamb.” But even the wise-cracking Bryson is swiftly sobered by the sights and smells of Kibera, an “un-town” where perhaps as many as 1 million people live in squalor. Bryson made the trip at the invitation of the charity organization CARE International with the understanding that he would write about CARE’s programs in Africa. And in fact, all royalties and profits from this 54-page hardcover go to the charity. But that’s not to say the content is all bleak. He visits sites popularized by the movie “Out of Africa,” looks at the fossilized bones of pre-historic humans in the National Museum, explores a lush reef, climbs through the rediscovered ruins of and ancient settlement called Gedi. It’s not all hopeless. As one of Bryson’s guides tells him: “In Kenya we always have hope.” And hope is ultimately what this book, and CARE, are all about. (ISBN 0-7679-1506-2)
Travel magazines
Spa Worldwide Guide 2003
(on newsstands until May; $6.99)
In the U.S. alone, spas were a $10.7 billion industry in 2001, according to the International Spa Association. That’s serious money. So why is it hard for some people to take spa-going seriously? Maybe it’s because of magazine stories that begin with tiresome, feather-headed phrases like this: “Luxury in the Bahamas. Exclusivity is the password . . .” and “Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin TouchSpa is charting new territory . . . ” both of which appear here. Fortunately, a respectable number of this magazine’s 310 pages have something new, something of substance, to say. “Deciphering the Medi-Spa” delves into those establishments that blur the line between medical treatments and relaxation therapies, and tells how to separate the trustworthy from the sham. “New Zealand’s Thermal Explorer Highway” charts a course through the geology of the North Island, past hot springs, geysers and bubbling mud–and lingering at the spas that nature has inspired. Those two stories alone may be worth the cover price, even though predictably gushy listings, nice color photographs aside, hog more than half the publication. On newsstands until May.
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The Chicago Tribune Travel section does not sell any of the items reviewed in the Resourceful Traveler column. Purchase information appears at the end of each product reviewed. ISBN codes are given for books, which may be purchased at, or ordered through, local bookstores.
