In his introduction to The Year of Eating Dangerously, an adolescent Tom Parker Bowles speaks to the all-you-can-eat American Kubla Khan of his youth, "where hot dogs paved the streets and Kool-Aid flowed from taps ... while Corey Haim kept the well-coiffed vampires at bay." Two decades later, Bowles has ripened into an international food critic and prominent writer for "Mail on Sunday" and the chic British magazine, Tatler.

The Year of Eating Dangerously is a book detailing Bowles's culinary journeys in search of "the world's most thrilling, terrifying, and odd foods"—dog in Korea, bees in Laos, blowfish in Japan, etc. Part Gulliver and part self-admitted "fat bastard," Bowles has written both a travelogue to strange and exotic worlds and a panegyric to his own gluttonous and overzealous overeating. Bowles (son of the high-profile Camilla Parker Bowles-cum-Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall) is smart, stylish, erudite, and hip in a sardonic, unmistakably limey sense—like a lost son of Nigella Lawson and Eddie Izzard. While the project owes an enormous debt to Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations—which Bowles acknowledges—his sly, tongue in cheek wit and velveteen British foppishness, sets it apart from Bourdain's macho, New Yorker fearlessness and serves up a funnier and more relatable dish.

Last week Bowles held a talk at Barnes and Noble on everything from the drunken, Jack Ass-esque origins of the concept to his personal beefs with factory farming and cruelty. (Everything, not surprisingly, but his royal roots and family scandal, which was clearly the attraction for half the attendees). Best of all, he seemed genuinely ecstatic to be back in his edible Mecca and both the book and lecture were peppered with shout-outs to the lobster roll at Mary's Fish Camp, the J.G. Mellon Cheeseburger, Nobu's yellowtail with jalapeño, and Blue Ribbon sushi—everything that makes us food-obsessed New Yorkers proud. But what, of all the world's weird and wonderful cuisine, is the most dangerous thing he ate in his travels? "Airplane food," he admitted, "the stuff is just so boring and wretched everywhere in the world."
—Gregory Christie