“Trillin is our funniest food writer. He writes with charm, freedom, and a rare respect for language.” – New York magazine In this delightful and delicious book, Calvin Trillin, guided by an insatiable appetite, embarks on a hilarious odyssey in search of “something decent to eat.” Across time zones and cultures, and often with his wife, Alice, at his side, Trillin shares his triumphs in the art of culinary discovery, including Dungeness crabs in California, barbecued mutton in Kentucky, potato latkes in London, blaff d’oursins in Martinique, and a $33 picnic on a no-frills flight to Miami. His eating companions include Fats Goldberg, the New York pizza baron and reformed blimp; William Edgett Smith, the man with the Naughahyde palate; and his six-year-old daughter, Sarah, who refuses to enter a Chinese restaurant unless she is carrying a bagel (“just in case”). And though Alice “has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day,” on the road she proves to be a serious eater–despite “seemingly uncontrollable attacks of moderation.” Alice, Let Eat amply demonstrates why The New Republic called Calvin Trillin “a classic American humorist.” “One of the most brilliant humorists of our times . . . Trillin is guaranteed good reading.” – Charleston Post and Courier “Read Trillin and laugh out loud.” – Time Calvin Trillin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1963. He lives in New York. 1 Alice   Now that it’s fashionable to reveal intimate details of married life, I can state publicly that my wife, Alice, has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day. I also might as well admit that the most serious threat to our marriage came in 1975, when Alice mentioned my weight just as I was about to sit down to dinner at a New Orleans restaurant named Chez Helène. I hardly need add that Chez Helène is one of my favorite restaurants in New Orleans; we do not have the sort of marriage that could come to grief over ordinary food.   Without wanting to be legalistic, I should mention that Alice brought up the weight issue during a long-distance telephone call—breaking whatever federal regulations there are against Interstate Appetite Impairment. Like many people who travel a lot on business, I’m in the habit of calling home every evening to share the little victories and defeats of the day—the triumph, for instance, of happening upon a superior tamale stand in a town I thought had long before been completely carved into spheres of influence by McDonald’s and Burger King, or the misery of being escorted by some local booster past the unmistakable aroma of genuine hickory-wood barbecuing into La Maison de la Casa House, whose notion of “Continental cuisine” seems to have been derived in some arcane way from the Continental-Trailways bus company. Having found myself on business in New Orleans —or, as it is sometimes expressed around my office, having found it my business to find business in New Orleans—I was about to settle into Chez Helène for a long evening. First, of course, I telephoned Alice in New York. I assumed it would give her great pleasure to hear that her husband was about to have enough sweet potatoes and fried oysters to make him as happy as he could manage to be outside her presence. Scholars of the art have often mentioned Chez Helène as an example of what happens when Creole blends with Soul—so that a bowl of greens comes out tasting of spices that the average greens-maker in Georgia or Alabama probably associates with papists or the Devil himself.   “I’m about to have dinner at Chez Helène,” I said.   “Dr. Seligmann just told me today that you weighed a hundred and eighty pounds when you were in his office last week,” Alice said. “That’s terrible!”   “There must be something wrong with this connection,” I said. “I could swear I just told you that I was about to have dinner at Chez Helène.”   “You’re going to have to go on a diet. This is serious.”   It occurred to me that a man telephoning his wife from a soul-food restaurant could, on the excuse of trying to provide some authentic atmosphere, say something like “Watch yo’ mouth, woman!” Instead, I said, “I think there might be a better time to talk about this, Alice.” Toward the end of the second or third term of the Caroline Kennedy Administration was the sort of time I had in mind.   “Well, we can talk about it when you get home,” Alice said. “Have a nice dinner.”   I did. It is a measure of my devotion to Alice that I forgave her, even though my second order of fried chicken was ruined by the realization that I had forgotten to tell her I had actually weighed only a hundred and sixty-six pounds. I always allow fourteen pounds for clothes.   I must say that Alice tempers her rigidity on the meals-per-day issue by having a broad view of what constitutes an hors d’oeuvre. That is not, of course, her only strong point. She is tenacious, for instance—having persisted for five or s