WE ARE EXPERIENCING A SLIGHT DELAY

A bestselling author and TV writer muses on his experiences with travel and food.

In his latest book, Janetti, a producer for Family Guy and the author of Do You Mind If I Cancel? and Start Without Me, offers a compendium of traveler’s tales and tips along with wry musings on how professional success changed the way he traveled. His earliest trips took place on Cunard Line cruise ships because his father was a salesman who was able to get free tickets for the family to travel in “steerage.” On one such trip, the author met a college student whose family was traveling (and also eating) first class. The experience changed him, he writes. From that point on, he “wanted in” to what he imagined were the glorious excesses of “Caligula’s Rome.” Janetti would only see that world after gaining affluence in adulthood. In the opening essay, he describes his trip to a wellness retreat to Italy, despite aversions to eating “gluten-free meals with…strangers dressed in ill-fitting spandex.” In a self-mocking aside, Janetti observes that in middle-class Queens, wellness “was what you were when you weren’t sick. It was the baseline.” Now it has become aspirational, “like the peak of Everest.” In another essay, Janetti recounts an excursion to a Noma restaurant pop-up in Mexico that featured a 20-course exotic-foods extravaganza, while another references exclusive treehouse dining in Rio de Janeiro. The author concludes with travel do's and don’ts, most of which focus on being generous to those who do the work of making travel pleasant for travelers (and especially those with means)—e.g., servers, housekeepers, and concierge staff members. Janetti's fans will no doubt appreciate his dry, self-deprecating wit, but some readers may take issue with the unintentional classism that underlies some of the author's observations.

Mostly entertaining but at times mildly discordant.