Book Review of Road Food: An Eater's Guide To More Than 1,000 Of The Best Local Hot Spots & Hidden Gems Across America by Jane & Michael Stern

I'm back from my hiatus due to a family road trip, which makes this the perfect time to post my review of Road Food: An Eater's Guide To More Than 1,000 Of The Best Local Hot Spots & Hidden Gems Across America by Jane & Michael Stern. I requested a free review copy of this one from Blogging For Books specifically because I knew we were going on our trip and I thought we could try out this guide on the road before I reported back to my blog readers. The cover is an attractive vintage-y feeling map with a few favorite restaurants marked. It made me eager to flip through the book.

However, when I looked inside, I started with my own hometown to get my bearings, and I only found one entry. While my city isn't a huge metropolis like Chicago or New York, it is full of unique hidden gems if one knows where to look. Unfortunately, lame tourists (and the guides they tend to carry) are notorious for checking out only one disgusting hot dog shack that most locals I know can't fathom how the place is still in business or stomach their food. ...and Road Food's one suggestion for our town? It was just that very place. This made me extremely wary of the Sterns' picks for other cities, because I couldn't help but wonder if the locals in those towns felt the same way about those restaurants as my friends and I feel about the nasty hot dog restaurant the Sterns chose to represent my area.

Unfortunately, after putting Road Food to the road test, I can say that's exactly how the locals feel. Each pick that landed anywhere near our 1,200 mi route was overpriced and overhyped. Every time we asked someone we knew or a friendly face at a local gas station what they thought of the food at the eateries Jane & Michael Stern suggested, we were met with grimaces, frowns, and hearty warnings to eat elsewhere. Nevertheless, sometimes people can have a different take on a place because they're from the area. Maybe the owners of the restaurant are unpopular in the community, so their establishment isn't favored. Maybe it had a rough opening and nobody has been able to forget those initial bad experiences. So, we tried three of the restaurants recommended in Road Food. ...and, they were all expensive with food that was meh at best and disgusting at worst. One had okay service, and two had horrible, inattentive servers. Two were so lousy with charm that we could see how tourists like the Sterns might have been easily sucked in by the decor targeted at them, and one couldn't have had a more generic atmosphere. All they had in common was that they weren't worth visiting, and that the Sterns and Road Food had led us badly astray.

In addition to Road Food failing 3/3 times in terms of suggesting clean, affordable restaurants near our route with good service and yummy food, it failed on another level. For a book that has had so many printings, I was baffled to find that it didn't have a more effective system for travelers attempting to use it to determine where the restaurants contained within are located in relation to their route. For example, since the book is organized by geographical region, a transparent map of said region with the restaurants printed on it that one could lay on top of a trip route map and look for overlap might be a neat idea. Also, a useful indexing system, like being able to search in the back for eateries off of I-75, would be helpful. 

In short, Road Food is a hot mess. It is a heavy, cumbersome book that did nothing but lead us to waste time and money in gross restaurants that were disappointing. It also took up precious space in our small car. I'm not sure how it ever would've been helpful, but, in this day and age, the  vagabond diner is much better served by turning to Yelp and Google.