During the 7 1/2 years that Mimi Sheraton served as restaurant critic of the New York Times, she reviewed more than 900 establishments, eating out some 30 to 40 times a month. One year, she recalls, she dined at home only five times: Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day and her husband's birthday. Last fall, seeking a different perspective as well as a smaller dress size, she left the Times. "I wanted to be free to think about food in a greater variety of ways," says Sheraton. "I wanted to travel more and take a more national viewpoint on food than I could at a city newspaper." While her interest in restaurants remains undiminished, Sheraton, making her debut as a TIME contributor, reports this week on a broader subject: the new popularity of American country-style cuisine, symbolized particularly by the increased use of a pesky Southwestern tree called mesquite as a cooking fuel (see LIVING). Sheraton will report on and evaluate culinary trends and will also cover such allied subjects as food trade shows, shifting tastes and new food products and equipment. "I'm especially interested in institutional food," she says, "that is, any place where the audience is more or less captive. That includes schools, airlines, prisons and company cafeterias."

Since she cut free from her newspaper column five months ago, Sheraton has lost 15 lbs. She notes, "My husband and I thought we would enjoy eating dinner at home, but we quickly got to the point where we couldn't look at each other across the dining table. The restaurant experience is more than just eating; it's an occasion and you rise to it. We even found that the quality of our conversation was higher at a restaurant." Now Sheraton and her husband dine out an average of "3 1/2 times" a week.

"Ah well," she sighs with resignation, "you have to have a mania about your subject, like the film critic who goes to the movies on his day off."

The restaurant meals, all consumed incognito (Sheraton refuses to pose fullface for the camera, to make it harder for restaurateurs to identify her and proffer extraordinary service), will help inform her next book, a New York City restaurant guide to be published early next year. The book, she says, will take "a different angle" from her definitive Mimi Sheraton's The New York Times Guide to New York Restaurants. She is also collaborating with Comedian Alan King on a compendium of memoirs, recipes and restaurant anecdotes called Is Salami-and-Eggs Better Than Sex? The answer to that curious question will be available next November, the book's publication date.