Straight Up Tasty

Richman is best known for hosting the Travel Channel’s Man v. Food, where he attempts to ingest oversized delicacies like a three-pound cinnamon roll and a 48-ounce chicken-fried steak. With no formal cooking or restaurant experience, and a writing style somewhere between playful and confused (burgers are “meaty masterpieces,” appetizers are “smelling salts for our taste buds”), Richman fills his debut cookbook with lots of cheese and ground beef. His biggest boast is that he has “tried breakfast burritos from Indianapolis to Denver,” and he serves up a flavorful version here, with red pepper, avocado, and pepper jack. There are numerous attempts at adding international flair. Some are great, in an overwhelming kind of way, such as a banh mi burger with Canadian bacon, pâté, ground pork, and Asian spices; while others, like the reuben maki (sauerkraut, cheese, and Russian dressing inside rolled-up slices of corned beef), are more of a mess. Richman also has a strange preoccupation with placing sandwiches not alongside, but inside, bowls of soup. His “frawnch” onion soup has a grilled roast beef panini at its bottom, and his tomato soup is topped with grilled cheese sandwich dumplings. For dessert there’s chocolate cake, with an ingredient list of eggs, mayonnaise, and one box of chocolate cake mix; Richman tells the reader that “mayonnaise is only oil and eggs,” but this may not be a sufficient excuse for such an odd choice. (May)