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eat your way across the U.S.A. ++BY JANE AND MICHAEL STERN ++BROADWAY BOOKS ++359 PAGES ++NONFICTION BY SAM SIFTON | picture that Edward Hopper painting "Nighthawks" for a moment. You know the one; it's on the wall of every third dorm room in the United States. The diner. There's a couple in the middle of the frame, almost Bogie and Bacall, smoking; a jake drinking coffee with his back to the viewer; a bald-headed counter boy bussing something under the counter. You ever looked for that diner? I have -- or for an approximation of it -- in every American city and town I've ever traveled through: driving too late, too fast, too far from home. Hopper wanted in his art, he said, "all the sweltering, tawdry life of the American small town, this sad desolation of our suburban landscape." Throw in a plate of pulled pork or a raspberry lime rickey -- a roadside diner in Nowheresville and three locals sitting silent in a booth as the waitress dishes the police chief, the smell of bacon strong in the air -- and I'm on board. Jane and Michael Stern, who write the "Two for the Road" column in Gourmet, aren't quite so depressive (indeed, their model might be Norman Rockwell), but they too have spent a great deal of time eating along American highways, and their "Eat Your Way Across the U.S.A." is the result. The book purports to "take the guesswork out of what and where to eat when traveling across the United States," and offers readers an enthusiastic guide to 500 "diners, farmland buffets, lobster shacks, pie palaces and other all-American eateries." It's filled with sidebars on diner slang, "Tex-Mex Lex" (a handful of "helpful" menu terms in "Spanish, pigeon-Spanish, Mexican, Cal-Mexican, and Tex-Mexican"), regional food "fundamentals" and the like. It will be, the introduction promises, "your appetite's favorite travel companion." It isn't, of course (couldn't be: only 500 restaurants? How could they have missed Nick's Inner Harbor Seafood in Baltimore?, etc.). But beyond this, a look at the literally dozens of Stern choices I've visited shows that most of them are exactly the restaurants Joe Everyman would have found if he'd asked the guy at the gas station where to get chicken fried steak at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night. Each municipality has its gems and its fool's gold. The Sterns, I'd warrant, have too often ended up with the latter. A New York example: Benny's Burritos is "a dining experience that is downtown New York at its most beguiling." Only I'd aver if you've just driven your minivan in from Sheboygan. Of course I'm holding the couple to a very high standard. But they deserve the treatment. Their Gourmet column is both interesting and fun, and their "Roadfood," examining just that, was not nearly so saccharine as this. But "Eat Your Way" is far, far too limited in scope for a guide book, although the thinking that went into it seems directed exactly at that goal. The book aims to be a road food Zagat Survey and ends up reading like something a traveling "foodie" would put in a newsletter. It's random and reads like leftovers from their Gourmet files. Too bad. July 25, 1997 Sam Sifton is senior editor of NYPress. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html