A friend of mine – another food writer – recently got an interesting assignment: He was hired to edit one of the Zagat guides. This entailed sifting through all the review form submissions, lifting out the pithy little phrases, and constructing composite reviews of them.

“It was awful,” he told me. “I swear, if I have to read the words ‘to die for’ or ‘you’ll think you’re in Italy’ or ‘save room for dessert’ one more time, I’ll throttle someone.” This has always been one of the biggest problems with Zagat – the level of analysis tends to be low. Besides, I wouldn’t trust a bunch of strangers to tell me which movie to see, or where to buy a suit (especially if they’re prone to cliches like “to die for”), so why would I let them tell me where to eat? And, contrary to Zagat’s organizing principle, popularity doesn’t necessarily equal quality – if it were that simple, I’d base my music purchases exclusively on the Billboard charts. Fortunately, the Internet has provided plenty of other options for those of us who prefer a less homogenized form of food information. The best of these is Chowhound.com, the excellent series of regional message boards where foodies trade tips, advice, and opinions. Several of the city’s most highly regarded food finds of recent years – including Di-Fara’s Pizza in Midwood, and the Queens Thai powerhouse Sripraphai – were lauded on Chowhound long before they began to generate a citywide buzz. Many more Chowhound picks remain largely unknown beyond the Web site itself.

But that may be about to change. For several years, the site’s most informative posts have been compiled into weekly e-mail newsletters, and now that material has been cobbled into a book, “The Chowhound’s Guide to the New York Tristate Area” (Penguin, 480 pages, $18).

The “Chowhound’s Guide” doesn’t claim to be encyclopedic or exhaustive – it assumes you already know that the cheesecake is good at Junior’s, that the brunch is good at Blue Ribbon, and that everything is good at Union Square Cafe. As head hound Jim Leff writes in the introduction, “Any food guide will tell you about L’Ecole, the French cooking school. Only ‘The Chowhound’s Guide’ will hip you to L’Ecole’s early bird service – the shift where the teachers cook, instead of the students.”

If that sounds a bit elitist, well, yes. Chowhound is essentially a community of food geeks, and geeks can sometimes get too obsessed with one-upmanship. “You call that an obscure Cuban restaurant? Listen, I know some obscure Cuban restaurants” – that sort of thing.

But as Mr. Leff likes to point out, Chowhound’s guiding force is ultimately the pursuit of deliciousness, and there’s no shortage of that in this book. You want Serbian food in Queens? You want Russian someplace other than Brighton Beach? You want kosher in Midtown? It’s all here, lovingly and informatively described by people who take their food seriously.

The trick is figuring out how to access the information, because the book is formatted very oddly. The entries, though sorted alphabetically, have headings that sometimes refer to the type of food, sometimes to a neighborhood, and sometimes to a restaurant. So the “J” listings include “Chinatown Beef JERKY,” “JOEY THAI, the Alter Ego of the Blimpie’s Sub Shop on Thirty-First Street,” and “On the Way to JFK AIRPORT.” Mr. Leff (who I suspect had some spirited arguments with his editor about this format) calls this sequencing “right brain”; I call it confusing, and you probably will too.

Fortunately, there’s a series of extremely helpful indexes in the back, where all the book’s entries are listed by cuisine, neighborhood, and venue name. Thanks to these breakdowns, this guide really is, as Mr. Leff claims, New York’s “ultimate map to edible treasure.”

By coincidence, another guide to the city’s gustatory nooks and crannies has just been published: Suzanne Parker’s “Eating Like Queens: A Guide to Ethnic Dining in America’s Melting Pot, Queens, New York” (Jones Books, 250 pages, $17). Ms. Parker, a Queens native and Forest Hills resident, takes an educational approach, providing primers that guide the reader through the often-confusing vagaries of, say, Malaysian food versus Indonesian, or Colombian versus Ecuadorean. In some cases, she even provides recipes for the food she’s describing.

These cuisine-specific backgrounders are informative, but each one culminates in a series of extremely tiny restaurant reviews – usually just one or two sentences apiece – which seems like a measly payoff. “Very fresh fish. Try the tagine” may not be as vacuous as “to die for,” but it isn’t much more helpful. The result is a book that feels more like a ethno-culinary textbook than a practical eating guide.

Several other interesting food-related titles have recently hit bookstores, including Aliza’s Green’s handy “Field Guide to Meat” (Quirk Books, 312 pages, $15). If you’ve never quite understood the difference between a hanger steak and a skirt steak, or between a quail and a pheasant, this is the book for you. There’s information on which part of the animal a given cut comes from; what it looks, feels, and tastes like; and the best ways to store and prepare it. It has plenty of photos, too. Well-written, straightforwardly organized, and featuring rounded corners so you can easily slip it into your bag on your way to the butcher, this is essential reading for any enthusiastic carnivore.

If your taste in food reading goes beyond guidebooks and reference, check out Susan Marks’s “Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food” (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $23), a cultural history of the fictitious character who was dreamed up by corporate executives in 1921 and went on to become arguably the best-known name in 20th-century American food. It’s an impressive story: Did you know that Betty had her own radio show during the 1930s and ’40s? Or that American housewives used to mail their cooking questions to Betty, at the rate of more than 4,000 letters a day? Or that first-year sales of the first Betty Crocker cookbook, published in 1950, rivaled that of the Bible?

Ms. Marks puts all of this information in historical context while maintaining a fun, entertaining style, and she’s sprinkled in some original Betty Crocker recipes, too (I can’t wait to try “Slip Slide Custard Pie”). My only quibble: How can a book like this not have an index? Betty herself would no doubt wag a disapproving finger about that oversight.