With a well-thumbed copy of Zagat or Michelin at hand, does New York really need another restaurant guide? Food blogger Steve Plotnicki thinks he’s found a niche to fill with his new, self-published “The 100 Best Restaurants of North America & Europe” ($6.95).

Unlike the mainstream guides — geared as they are to those who merely enjoy eating out — Mr. Plotnicki’s 56-page pocket-size book is aimed at the small cohort of well-off foodies whose travel plans are driven not by museums, shopping, or sports, but by the restaurants at which they want to book a table. He calls his target audience “avid dining hobbyists.” Their poster boy is Park Avenue-based Mr. Plotnicki himself, a former entertainment business mogul who heads off to Europe several times each year to seek out restaurants that matter and talk shop with their chefs.

Mr. Plotnicki’s personal restaurant reviews, in which he doesn’t hesitate to slam restaurants highly praised by others, can be found on his Web log, Opinionated About Dining. The ratings in his new book, on the other hand, are based on input solicited through OAD from about 900 confirmed foodies, a quarter of whom live outside America. The top-100 list was culled from reviews of 1,600 “fine-dining” restaurants. In arriving at individual scores, based on a 120-point scale, Mr. Plotnicki weighted each opinion according to how actively the contributor travels to dine. If you’ve rated two or three top restaurants, your opinion counts for less than that of someone who’s dined at a dozen or more. Distance traveled also counts. “If you live in L.A. but rate restaurants in Germany and Spain, your score counts for more,” he said.

The top-scoring restaurant in America is the Los Angeles sushi restaurant Urasawa (113 points), while the top European spot is Troisgros in Rouen, France (116 points). Top-scoring New York City restaurants include the perennial favorites Jean-Georges (109 points), Per Se (107 points), and Le Bernardin (104 points), among others. (See below.)

Mr. Plotnicki is a marvel of dining stamina. In Guardian’s food writer Jay Rayner’s upcoming book, “The Man Who Ate the World,” the author recounts an evening when Mr. Plotnicki took him on a “crawl” of Manhattan’s starriest restaurants. In their nearly six-hour marathon, the pair sampled signature dishes at Jean-Georges, Per Se, Bouley, Eleven Madison Park, and wd-50, where the crawl culminated in a round of chef Wylie Dufresne’s most adventurous dishes and desserts. By then, Mr. Rayner actually felt like crawling, while Mr. Plotnicki was still in fine fettle. (For the record, Mr. Plotnicki, the 54-year-old son of a kosher butcher, raised in Brooklyn, has only the bare beginnings of a belly.)

In positioning his new guide, Mr. Plotnicki said that he’s “trying to hold the middle ground between the editorial stance of the Michelin Guide, with its ratings by anonymous inspectors, and the populist position of Zagat, which doesn’t editorialize at all — it’s a blank slate filled in with comments from diners.”

Unlike most restaurant critics, Mr. Plotnicki has no interest in dining anonymously. His aim, according to his Web log, is to “elicit the best possible meal that a restaurant has to offer and in that context anonymity actually hurts instead of helps.”

Taking a cue from Michelin, Mr. Plotnicki rates restaurants in ascending order as “important local choices” (between 95 and 99 points), “worth going out of your way for” (between 100 and 104 points), and “worth planning a trip around” (105 points or more).

Some will cry foul at Mr. Plotnicki’s ratings. In New York, for example, fans of Daniel and L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon will be irate to discover neither restaurant made the city’s top 10. The most startling national omission, perhaps, is Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago. And whole cities with ambitious dining cultures, including Atlanta and Miami, failed to rate a single listing in the top 100. “My goal is to tell it like it is,” Mr. Plotnicki said with a shrug. “If I was tempering it somehow, I’d be just like the rest of the media.”

“The 100 Best Restaurants of North America” is available at independent bookshops, including Kitchen Arts & Letters (1435 Lexington Ave. at 93rd Street), at Amazon.com, and through the author’s Web log, oad.typepad.com.

Plotnicki’s Top 10 New York Restaurants

These New York restaurants, rated on a 120-point scale, are included in Steve Plotnicki’s new dining guide, “The 100 Best Restaurants of North America & Europe.”

Jean Georges . . . 109 points
(1 Central Park West at Columbus Circle, 212-299-3900)

Per Se . . . 107 points
(10 Columbus Circle, 4th Fl., at Eighth Avenue, 212-823-9335)

Le Bernardin . . . 104 points
(155 W. 51st St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-554-1515)

Sushi Yasuda . . . 104 points
(204 E. 43rd St., between Second and Third avenues, 212-972-1001)

Bouley . . . 103 points
(120 West Broadway at Duane Street, 212-964-2525)

Kuruma Sushi . . . 103 points
(7 E. 47th St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-317-2802)

Masa . . . 103 points
(10 Columbus Circle, 4th Fl., between Broadway and 59th Street, 212-823-9800)

Eleven Madison Park . . . 102 points
(1 Madison Ave., between 24th and 25th streets, 212-889-0905)

Craft . . . 101 points
(43 E. 19th St., between Broadway and Park Avenue South, 212-780-0880)

Sugiyama . . . 101 points
(251 W. 55th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-956-0670)