Making foreign fare less ... foreign

Try This: Traveling the Globe Without Leaving the Table
By Danyelle Freeman
HarperCollins. 287 pp. $16.99

I have a friend - actually several friends - who, when presented with the menu in an Italian restaurant, will order the chicken parm. Every time.

There's nothing wrong with chicken parm, per se. It's the routine that irks me. Suggest that they try something else - and not the veal parm! - and they balk. Is it faintheartedness? Maybe. I think that many people are dissuaded by embarrassment.

There's so much on menus today in American restaurants - even the so-called American restaurants - it can be overwhelming to the meat-and-potatoes-loving populace for whom speck is a piece of lint and Livornese sauce conjures thoughts of deep-red organ meats their grandmother fried in onions.

So here comes Danyelle Freeman, the New York-based restaurant writer known as Restaurant Girl, with a light, chatty Yankee's guide to some of the more popular international cuisines, the imperatively titled Try This. It's equal parts memoir, travelogue, etiquette guide, and glossary.

Your timid friends may need reassurance from a former New York Daily News critic that speck is a form of ham and that a proper Livornese sauce simply contains tomatoes, onion, garlic, capers, and black olives and has a subtle salty tang. And they may actually enjoy this stuff.

Which is what this whole book boils down to. Try this. You may like it. It may be fun. It won't kill you.

Freeman, in her 30s, says that she was an unadventurous eater as a child in New York's suburbs, though she recounts that her food-obsessed parents exposed her and her siblings to delicious restaurant meals and the occasional glass of sangria at their favorite Spanish restaurant.

It was her move to New York that played into her sense of curiosity and allowed her to break out as a connoisseur. (I've broken bread with Freeman. Though she probably is a size zero, she can put away copious amounts of food while recounting details of long-past meals down to the smallest morsel.)

The game has changed since she was a kid in New Jersey. "We speak a whole new language of food today," she writes. "We don't just eat Chinese food anymore: We eat Szechuan, Cantonese, or Hunan, and that means things like ma po tofu, flowering chives, and sea cucumber."