(FORTUNE Magazine) – A glance into any well-stocked bookstore these days suggests that restaurant guidebooks are no less a growth industry than the restaurant business. At least 150 guides are in print, ranging from idiosyncratic tours of regional American dishes to global compendiums that include hotels and travel tips. But only a few live up to the best standards of the genre. Like a satisfying meal, a guidebook to restaurants should be delicious as well as nourishing. It should contain savory, evocative writing along with sound information, and it should be served up hot, not stale. The books reviewed here are the best of a crop that is new since FORTUNE surveyed the field 2 1/2 years ago (March 5, 1984). Back then a dozen guides craved appraisal. The standouts were New York-only books: Mimi Sheraton's New York Times guide, now out of print, and Henri Gault and Christian Millau's witty The Best of New York (Crown Publishers). Of those that covered the whole U.S., Egon Ronay's TWA Guide (St. Martin's Press) offered the most trenchant criticisms. Though Ronay and Gault/Millau remain among the best available, they need updating. New restaurants come along and older ones change; chefs move to the competition and new styles take over. Just now, for example, the ''new American style'' of cooking is in vogue, harking back to ever more childhood- oriented eating patterns -- peach cobbler, bread pudding, and the like. Among recently published guidebooks, six stand out for style, utility, or both. All cover food and some include hotel and sightseeing advice as well. They are either new or updated yearly. A seventh reviewed here is a perfect example of what a guide should not be. New York City, the gastronomic capital of the U.S. with close to 14,000 licensed restaurants, continues to account for a disproportionate share of the best guidebooks. The Restaurants of New York by Seymour Britchky (Simon & Schuster, $10.95) is laden with rich, descriptive prose. With this veteran appraiser of the New York scene, you inhale the aroma of the restaurant's mood as well as its food. He tells you what to order, what not to order, and what to ask for even if it is not on the menu. He also advises on tipping. On a credit card voucher, always write in the total at the bottom: ''If you do not,'' he warns, ''an emendation may be made favoring the waiter.'' Britchky reports this practice to be common enough in New York restaurants that credit card companies have a term for it -- override. He adds that checks also are often incorrectly totaled, rarely to the patron's advantage.

Britchky's prose is so seamlessly structured that you will find it hard to extract a single phrase that encapsulates a place. You have to read the entire review -- not a bad way to spend time -- or go by the stars. Lutece and Chanterelle are the only places Britchky gives four stars. Surprisingly the most expensive place in the city, the Quilted Giraffe, and the most nearly imperial, Petrossian, are omitted in the 1987 edition. Zagat New York Restaurant Survey (Zagat Survey, New York, $8.95) is produced by Tim and Nina Zagat, lawyers who started it in 1979 as a hobby simply because they like to eat out. Then it got more complicated, as things do with lawyers. The couple decided to enlist a jury of other frequent eaters- out, mainly nonprofessional critics, to contribute their ratings; then the results were run through a computer to come up with a consensus. Lutece, the Four Seasons, La Cote Basque, and the Quilted Giraffe are the current top choices. The critiques are concise, and the Zagats handle deftly the inevitable disagreements that come with a 2,232-member gourmet gang. Of the Black Sheep in Greenwich Village they write: ''Country-feeling French bistro is 'charming' and 'good for the price'; but reports of indigestion may give one pause.'' Next complication? They are putting together guides for several other cities and thinking of going national, a la Guide Michelin. Mariani's Coast-to-Coast Dining Guide (Times Books, $12.95) is the most useful national restaurant guide yet published. John F. Mariani, an industrious, enterprising, and knowing eater, has enlisted 38 professional dining critics, mostly newspaper men and women, to appraise the restaurants in 50 cities from San Francisco to Charlotte, North Carolina. This volume has four manifest advantages. First, the critics have eaten more than once at each restaurant. Second, it is current (just off the press) and tracks the comings and goings of those important people, the chefs. In Detroit, for example, contributor Molly Abraham of the Detroit Free Press lets us know that chef Jimmy Schmidt, who served up so many fine $50 meals at the old London Chop House, has left, but his replacement, Tom Varee, is another crack cook. Third, the guide covers not just the major restaurants but the critics' choices of informal, inexpensive places, including pizzerias, rib joints, and delicatessens. And finally, the authors do not bow and scrape. In Pittsburgh, Robert M. Bianco of the Pittsburgh Press writes wryly about the restaurant atop the U.S. Steel Building: ''The food, by Stouffers, is not particularly memorable, but the restaurant does have the good taste not to revolve.'' The Best Restaurants in America (Simon & Schuster, $12.95) is a widely sold book worth avoiding. East/West Network, which publishes in-flight magazines for ten airlines, says it solicited more than 100,000 members of its captive audiences to rate the restaurants of the land below. In a slightly defensive introduction, Jacques Pepin points out that this is not an ''elitist'' book. ''In a democratic society such as ours,'' he lectures, ''the people's choice is the only proper and acceptable alternative.'' Possibly so, but this sort of thing could give democracy a bad name. There is but little distinction; most of the 1,200-odd restaurants listed are given at least 3 1/2 stars out of a top four. In this starry-eyed effort, New York is said to have seven four-star restaurants, Miami five. Business Traveler's City Guide (Rand McNally & Co., $9.95) lacks verve but is a sound and serious listing of hotels, restaurants, and urban attributes in 63 U.S. cities. The hotels and restaurants are given no ratings, but inclusion itself is a fair endorsement since the list is selective. Two noteworthy guides take on the world, though they could not be more different in approach. Multinational Executive Travel Companion (Multinational Executive Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts; $50 in U.S., $70 outside) is broadly useful for the business traveler, listing dates of various national trade fairs, details of predicted weather, customs allowances, tipping conventions, travel documents needed, English-speaking physicians, and on and on. Included are 75 countries and 147 cities from Abu Dhabi to Zurich. The reader is given the addresses and telephone numbers of selected hotels and restaurants, but no descriptions. The Let's Go series (St. Martin's Press) is a library shelf of thick guides put out annually by Harvard Student Agencies, the same folks who will do your laundry if you are enrolled at Harvard. It is my favorite guide of the crop for detail and sheer reading pleasure.

The agency annually enlists a regiment of smart undergraduates and fans them out around the world. The current volumes include Let's Go U.S.A. and similar volumes for Europe; Mexico; Britain and Ireland; France; Italy; Greece; Israel and Egypt; Spain, Portugal, and Morocco; and California and the Pacific Northwest. Price: $9.95 each, except for Europe, which is $10.95. To give an idea of how much grist is in them, the 1986 Let's Go U.S.A. comes to 950 detailed pages. These guides are definitely not for the truffle crowd but instead are compendiums of restaurants, places to stay, transportation methods, sights worth seeing, and most practical general travel advice, especially for young backpackers but valuable to anyone. The section on Manhattan, for instance, lists five decent hotels with singles renting from $28 to $60 a night. The recommended restaurants hover around the $10-per-person charge, so don't expect Escoffier sauces or flower-packed dining rooms. What you will get in most cases is a hearty, plebeian meal -- which can make an invigorating change from standard expense-account fare, and for some palates even possesses a reverse cachet. The manager of one of San Francisco's swankiest dining rooms once told me, in a frank discussion of niceties, ''You know what I really like? Meat loaf and mashed potatoes.''