Eat Me

Restaurateur Kenny Shopsin has written the year’s ugliest food book — and one of the best.? A garish yellow volume illustrated with intentionally (or so one hopes) hideous photographs of okra and bizarre inventions like ”egg guacamole,” Eat Me embodies Shopsin’s culinary aesthetic. If Hazan is all about tradition, Shopsin swears by frozen pancake batter and ketchup: ”I do not believe in making things from scratch just to say I did.” And he is famous for kicking suspected snobs and indecisive customers out of his funky New York City restaurant. ”Why don’t you just order what sounds good to you?” Shopsin asks. ”I already know the answer. It is because people are afraid of being mediocre, of being ordinary.” Happily, his sensible, ornery book is neither. A