ALL THE NEWS ABOUT WHAT’S FIT TO EAT

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who decide at 6 that they want to go to dinner at 7, and those who reserved tonight’s table sometime last month. Neither has a perfect system. For while the last-minute eaters are invariably too late to get reservations at any of the restaurants of their choice, the planners arrive only to discover that the chef whose food they were so anxious to eat has just packed his pots and moved on.

In the modern world of restaurants, the early bird may not be the one who catches the worm. For while planners travel the world with their pockets full of clippings telling them where to get perfect pate in Paris and the best yak butter in Tibet, those who arrive with neither clippings nor clues have only to pick up the phone. Operators are standing by.

Whether you are a planner or the more spontaneous sort, here’s a guide to all sorts of guides aimed at making eating easier.

There is one absolutely perfect service for people who’ve forgotten to make plans. If they subscribe to Entree, a traveler’s newsletter, they can call any time of the day, from anywhere in the world, and ask for assistance. Think of it: There you are, alone in Tibet, with a mad desire to eat linguine. Call Entree and let them tell you where to go.

That is, in fact, exactly the sort of question they will be able to answer. The newsletter itself is quirky, breezily written and sophisticated. It arrives in the mailbox every month with rather arcane advice for the well-heeled traveler. Who else, after all, would be interested in a newsletter that tells you, in one month, about where to stay in Fiji and Katmandu, reviews a fabulously expensive hotel in Connecticut, a restaurant in Paris where you drink wine out of baby bottles, describes airport health clubs in Dallas and gives you an address to send for Viennese tortes by mail?

Entree costs $45 a year, which gives you a monthly newsletter and access to the 24-hour telephone hot line. Write to Entree, Box 5148, Santa Barbara 93150 , (805) 969-5848.

For anyone with an urgent need for local information, the Foodsource Hotline at (213) 930-2111, (818) 995-7572 and (714) 771-7411 answers the phone from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday. The operators are friendly, chatty and well-informed, and they will answer questions on everything from where to eat to what to do when your mousse won’t unmold. Starting this week, they will even make your reservations. Best of all, the service is free.

The Foodsource people also print a newsletter called L.A. a La Carte. It is written in a style so casual that it’s more like talking than writing, and it’s not much to look at. But editors Chloe Ross and Rita Garlington are in touch with the L.A. food community, and the little newsletter is filled with useful tips and information.

The Foodsource Hotline is free and L.A. a La Carte costs $30 a year; for a subscription, write to 200 S. Martel Ave., Los Angeles 90036.

Spontaneous eaters who find themselves in Vancouver will be glad to know that Western Canada has a similar hot line. The Vancouver Dine Line operates seven days a week from 11 to 11. A computerized service, it answers more than 100 calls a day from people desperate for dining advice. The service is free and the number is (604) 699-Dine.

New York also has a restaurant line. If you want to know where to eat in the Big Apple, call Dial and Dine at (212) 226-3388. Food phones, in fact, are a fast-growing business, and I would not be surprised to find them in cities all across America sometime soon.

But many people don’t want to let their fingers do the walking; for them, the anticipation is one of the greatest pleasures of going out to eat. Newsletters were created for such people. One of the newest, and to my mind one of the best, European Wine and Food, is an erudite, well-written and beautifully designed resource for serious eaters. Each issue has 12 tightly packed pages of prose ranging from the scholarly to the frankly sensual. The June issue describes a weekend of eating in Brussels, tells you where to get fish and chips in London and discovers some out-of-the-way restaurants in the suburbs of Paris and in Dijon. There is also an article about the best restaurant supply store in Italy (it has been open since 1860), an evaluation of the new guide by Henri Gault (on his own now, without Millau) and an interview with Italian wine maker Angelo Solci. For people who take their time at the table very, very seriously, this new newsletter is a wonderful treat.

European Wine and Food costs $38 a year. Payable by cheque (as they spell it) or American Express to the Southwest Press, Southwest House, Bath, BA1 2 XU, England.

Anybody who does much traveling within the United States should know about the new Mariani’s “Coast to Coast Dining Guide” (Times Books: $12.95).

“I decided to do the book,” says editor John Mariani, “simply because I needed it myself.” It is, in fact, the first comprehensive guide to American restaurants to appear since “Where to Eat in America” was published almost 10 years ago.

“The whole point of my guide,” says Mariani, “is that you should not trust any one critic.” Mariani asked critics in 50 cities to write a section of the book; our Lois Dwan wrote the Los Angeles chapter, Stan Sesser and Patricia Unterman of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote the San Francisco chapter and Mariani covered New York.

The book is well-written, well-indexed and easy to use. The critics are, for the most part, trustworthy. And, if you are given to traveling around the United States, the book is indispensable since it includes small towns as well as the giants. But the drawback to such a book is obvious: Like almost all restaurant guidebooks, it was out of date before it was printed. The L.A. section, for instance, has no mention of current restaurants like City, Rebecca’s or Patouts, while it praises the now-defunct Max au Triangle. Still, anyone arriving in a strange town ought to be able to eat well by using this guide.

If you spend a lot of time in any one city, and you want to have up-to-the-minute information, a local newsletter would be useful. The best of them, of course, are the most opinionated. And no city has more opinionated people than New York. My favorite guides to Gotham are published by two extremely different, and extremely opinionated, New Yorkers.

Seymour Britchky is one of the country’s most underrated critics. He is cranky and thorough, and his highly original Restaurant Letter is a compendium of small sociological essays. He tells his readers not only what they will be served when they go out to eat, but whose elbows they are likely to be grazing as they do so. Britchky is a master of the throwaway line, and his Letter is both incisive and funny.

Seymour Britchky’s Restaurant Letter costs $24 a year. For subscriptions, write to Box 155 E, New York, 10276.

New York’s newest newsletter, Colette Critique, by cook, author and food critic Colette Rosant, is criticism of another sort. Rosant nibbles her way around the city, making this the perfect read for the spontaneous eater. In one issue, Rosant is likely to tell you where to get good dim sum , describe a visit to chic Le Bernardin, give you tips on new appliances on the market and throw in a little market news (great ketchup, low-calorie tagliatelle ). She even stirs a couple of recipes into the stew. For anybody who likes the pungent flavor of New York, this is a very good guide.

Colette Critique costs $25 a year. For subscriptions , write to Colette Critique, 121 Varick St., New York 10013.

San Francisco has no guide as pithy as those to New York, but visitors will find that the “Updated Guide to the Best and Worst Restaurants in San Francisco, the Wine Country and Northern California” is very useful. These 12 simply typed pages manage to pack an awful lot of information.

The guide is published by George Gilbert, a former newspaperman who gives capsule reviews of dozens of restaurants, informs you on everything from quick meals to romantic dinners and even tells you where to get the best free bar snacks in town. In a section called “Crix Boiled Down,” he summarizes reviews of new restaurants by local critics. There’s nothing elegant about the writing or the layout, but then it only costs $2.25.

Send $2.25 plus 22 cents postage to Inside San Francisco Publications, 44 Monterey Blvd., San Francisco 94131.

And finally, there are two newsletters that have very little to do with restaurants--but everything to do with what restaurants are all about.

If you are eager to know more about wine and wine making, you could hardly do better than to send for the Simi News. Although many California wineries publish newsletters, this one does a particularly good job of explaining the complex technical side of wine making, exploring the seasonal changes in the vineyards (the News appears quarterly) and making you understand what makes wine taste the way that it does. The News often has recipes, as well as little reports on wine-tasting meals in restaurants.

The Simi News is free from the Simi Winery, 16275 Healdsburg Ave., Box 698, Healdsburg, Calif. 95448.

The best for last: a newsletter for everyone who likes to eat and likes to read and thinks that cooking is a pleasure. Whether you are a planner or an instant eater, Simple Cooking is a sheer joy to read.

The attractive 12- (or more) page quarterly is published by John Thorne, an eccentric who likes to devote whole issues to strawberries and cream, or bread and olives. But he always leavens the newsletter, like the time he devilishly tossed in an article about “Truly Awful Recipes” (“unnatural ingredients nonchalantly tossed together to everyone’s delight”). Thorne’s interest in food and cooking seems to be much the same as that of M.F.K. Fisher, who once said that paying attention to what you eat is merely a matter of self-respect.

Simple Cooking costs $12 a year. Write to Jackdaw Press, Box 371, Essex Station, Boston 02112.