A slice of braised bat, please

First, a health warning: don't read this book before eating. The title may promise "A Cook's Tour", and a search for the "perfect meal", but unless you've got a fairly strong stomach, it's more likely to put you off your food.

Vegetarians, in particular, should be especially wary. The prime ingredient in Anthony Bourdain's quest for culinary nirvana seems, much more often than not, to be fresh meat. Throughout this account of his worldwide trawl for unusual dishes, the notorious New York chef and crime writer repeatedly goes into all the gory, gruesome details of what it really means to be a carnivore. And he seems to enjoy doing so.

Anyone who read his best-selling memoir Kitchen Confidential - where he dished the dirt on what goes on behind the scenes in the restaurant business - will probably expect no less. It was a hellish expos? of depraved depths of food hygiene, infernal toil and drug addiction - all drawn from nearly three decades of personal experience. Old jokes about flies and soup suddenly seemed absurdly innocent and quaint.

Alarmingly, most professional chefs seemed to agree that these horror stories were largely true to life.

Since then, Bourdain has kept his job at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan, but for this follow-up book he switches from cook to consumer. The plan is simple: "I travel around the world doing whatever I want - I eat scary, exotic, wonderful food, doing cool stuff like I've seen in the movies, and looking for the perfect meal."

It sounds too good to be true. There are some conditions, though. He promises his wife not to sample monkey's brains. More hesitantly, he also allows a TV crew to follow him at all times.

Off he goes, starting in Portugal at a traditional pig slaughter, before venturing further afield to find much more extreme horrors and delicacies. He witnesses a wrestling match in a Russian Mafia club, and tries a traditional sauna. In Morocco, he succeeds in buying a whole lamb for cooking - to disturbingly comic effect. He dodges land mines in Cambodia and eats the potentially deadly fugu puffer fish in Tokyo.

A nauseating array of strange foodstuffs appears on his plate. There's braised reindeer in Russia; braised bat in Vietnam (like "inner tube, sauced with engine coolant"); iguana in Mexico ("almost no meat to speak of, just tough, rubbery skin, knobby, slimy little bones"); and the live heart of a cobra back in Saigon ("I give it one light chew, but the heart still beats... and beats... and beats"). Along the way, Bourdain supplies a more discursive survey of English cuisine, and a meditation on our celebrity chefs. Watching Jamie Oliver's show makes him "want to go back in time and bully him at school".

Such disdain is hardly surprising. Bourdain's whole approach is more akin to William Burroughs's Naked Lunch than Naked Chef, and is all the better for it. Throughout these adventures - all brilliantly written up in a raw, stylish gonzo prose, with pitch-black humour and a devilish turn of phrase - he maintains a distrust of artificiality and contrivance.

The fear and loathing in this Cook's Tour - and there is a lot of it - is nearly all reserved for himself. It seems that Bourdain's new-found role as "Mr Famous Travelling Chef Author Guy" is a deeply uncomfortable fit. As a result, some passages here have a distinctly queasy taste - and it's nothing to do with the food.