[Prial is the wine columnist for the New York Times. In the following review, he relates the events of The Debt to Pleasure and praises Lanchester's writing ability, made more impressive by the author's status as a "debutant novelist."]

Tarquin Winot, an English esthete and gourmand, remembers the time when, as an impressionable 11-year-old, he was taken to lunch at his older brother's boarding school. It was a meal "Dante would have hesitated to invent." In particular, he recalls "the jowly, watch-chained headmaster" plunging his arm into a vat and emerging "with a ladleful of hot food, steaming like fresh horse dung on a cold morning."

"For a heady moment," he says, "I thought I was going to be sick."

It was a defining experience in young Tarquin's life. "The combination of human, esthetic and culinary banality formed a negative revelation of great power," he explains, "and hardened the already burgeoning suspicion that my artist's nature isolated and separated me from my alleged fellowmen." Tarquin, now having achieved a self-confident and extremely loquacious adulthood, is the central figure—almost the only figure—in The Debt to Pleasure, a dazzling and delicious first novel by John Lanchester.

"I decided," Tarquin tells us, "to take a short holiday and travel southward through France, which is, as the reader will learn, my spiritual (and for a portion of the year, actual) homeland. I resolved that I would jot down my thoughts on the subject of food as I went, taking my cue from the places and events around me as well as from my own memories, dreams, reflections, the whole simmering together, synergistically exchanging savors and essences like some ideal daube."

By now, anyone familiar with the literature of food is beginning to murmur "Brillat-Savarin." And with good reason. The French lawyer and philosopher, whose 1825 treatise The Physiology of Taste is still the greatest of all books on food, is Tarquin Winot's muse. Brillat-Savarin called the sections of his book "meditations", Tarquin Winot speaks in terms of "culinary reflections." And what remarkable reflections they are. He informs us that "the primary vehicle" for transmitting them will be menus, "arranged seasonally."

"It seems to me," he says, "that the menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art. A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture or the psychology of an individual; it can be a biography, a cultural history, a lexicon; it speaks to the sociology, psychology and biology of its creator and its audience, and of course to their geographical location; it can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a shaping, a manifestation, a talisman, an injunction, a memory, a fantasy, a consolation, an allusion, an illusion, an evasion, an assertion, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark."

Prolix? Perhaps. Not many contemporary novelists work with 121-word sentences. But Mr. Lanchester is not just another contemporary novelist.

Tarquin's first menu is for blini with sour cream and caviar, Irish stew and a dessert called Queen of Puddings. In discussing blini, he invokes descriptions of Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Belgian and Polish pancakes, among others, then segues to reflections on wheat, the goddess Ceres, frying pans called placentas, Freud and David Copperfield. Moving to caviar, we learn why chess players should eat it and why a professional taster of Volga caviar will carry a dagger in his boot. Describing an outdoor meal, Tarquin wanders off into the etymology of "barbecue." It derives, he tells us, from the Haitian barbacado, a frame of sticks used to suspend beds and other things off the ground.

Irish stew conjures up a truly Proustian essay on Tarquin's Cork-born nanny and his actress mother. It touches on Brecht, Pinter, Ibsen and Stoppard, proceeds to his own childhood in London and Paris, considers the family's cooks ("a Dostoyevskian procession of knaves, dreamers, drunkards, visionaries, bores and frauds, every man his own light, every man his own bushel"), then gets down to the proper cuts of meat and the best potatoes ("Bishop or Pentland Javelin if using British varieties") and runs through the world's best stews, from the Belgian carbonade Flamande to the tagines of North Africa and the stufato di manzo of northern Italy. Deconstructing his Queen of Puddings, Tarquin complains—he's insufferable at times—that "it is almost impossible, in writing about or discussing it, to avoid the double genitive 'of' which used so to upset Flaubert."

As he makes his leisurely way across the Channel and on through Brittany and the Loire Valley, Tarquin drops tantalizing hints about another side of his life. He wears disguises, for one thing, and there have been violent deaths among people who are close to him. Why does he keep bringing up his brother, a successful painter? And who are the two young people he seems to be following? Suffice it to say that Tarquin is also an expert on mushrooms, those that are edible and those that are not.

To assume a superior air, to be arch for any length of time, is tough going for any writer. It's like playing faultless Mozart. For a debutant novelist, Mr. Lanchester pulls it off amazingly well. Now and then he falters, and there are clinkers. No matter; they just remind us how good the rest of his writing is.

Currently the deputy editor of The London Review of Books, Mr. Lanchester has been a book reviewer, a sports journalist, an obituary writer and, for three years, the restaurant critic of The Observer. One could say, cautiously, that he might think about giving up his day job.