Most of Food

Most Favored Vegetable No need to limit yourself to a red from Colorado or one of Idaho's browns. What about Yukon Gold? Or Peruvian purple? We're talking serious potato now -- the bulked-out veggie that conquered the culinary world in 1990. At power luncheries, a favorite appetizer of the glitterati was a spare baked potato. But you could get it boiled, fried, duchessed and, most of all, mashed.

Best Food on the Road Not so long ago, most U.S. hotel meals seemed designed to horrify any gourmet. But in 1990 the top-rated hotels in the first Zagat U.S. Travel Survey of more than 1,400 inns, resorts and spas all boasted superb cuisine as well as superluxury accommodations. So what if few but foreign tourists can afford them?

Best New Dining Concept One of the earliest harbingers of economic recession wasn't longer lines at soup kitchens. It was the sight of trendy restaurants frantically begging for new customers by lowering prices, simplifying menus and advertising themselves as -- code words of the '90s -- cafes, grills, bistros or trattorias.

Soundest Dietary Restriction The 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act mandates standard definitions of such terms as light and lowfat, bans misleading claims and requires food producers to list the amount of dietary fiber and saturated fat in raw seafood, fruit and vegetables as well as on most packaged-goods labels.

Latest Immortality Elixir Not so long ago, the secret ingredient to lower cholesterol was oat bran, which proved to be no more or less magical than low- fiber grains. In 1990 health nuts got hooked on canola oil, which is made from rapeseed. Enough! cried Julia Child. "If fear of food continues, it will be the death of gastronomy in the United States."

Best Wine Buys Alsatian whites and Chilean reds. The fruity, bone-dry Pinot Blancs and Pinot Gris from Alsace are still quality bargains from France. For everyday drinking, Chile's suave, uncomplicated Cabernet Sauvignons couldn't be beat at $3.99 and up.

Least-Sparkling Water It wasn't Perrier's year. First, lab tests found traces of benzene, a potential carcinogen, in samples of the green-bottled bubbly. Then the French government forced Perrier to drop the words naturally carbonated from its European labels. ("Naturally" had earlier been deemed a no-no in the U.S.) Evian has now supplanted Perrier as America's top-selling imported bottled water.

Biggest Turkey TV's most obnoxious chef is a would-be comic whose series appears on the Discovery Channel. Pasquale Carpino of Pasquale's Kitchen Express yowls snatches of operatic arias as he demolishes eggplants and describes his recipes in a tootsie-frootsie accent that was barely funny when Chico Marx used it.

Biggest Brewhaha Long the target of unions and minority-rights groups, Coors Brewing Co. acquired a new enemy with its popular promo for Coors Light, featuring a haunted house and the slogan "It Isn't Halloween Without the Silver Bullet." The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence described the ad's subliminal appeal to underage drinkers as "chilling."

Priciest Slab of Cholesterol Japan's richly marbled Kobe beef, from beer-fed cattle, was featured for the first time on the menus of a few U.S. restaurants. For $100 or so, you could order an inch-high steak weighing 14 oz. to 16 oz.