BASHING STUFF IS one of a writer's great pleasures, but for food writers in a food town like this one, bashables are in fairly short supply. There is the occasional bad dish or surly server, but standards are high in San Francisco. That leaves, as the food writer's principal task, appreciation – a far trickier art. How do you say something is good, worthy, deserving of a visit, without lapsing into the hortatory tedium of the retirement-party speech? Eyes have a way of glazing over when subjected to excessive proclamations of virtue. Pages are quickly turned as people search for the dirt or the truth, which ideally are the same thing.

Among appreciators of Bay Area gastronomy, none glows with more elegant brightness than Patty Unterman of the Examiner. She is a tremendous lover of cuisines of every description, of markets, restaurants, bakeries, and shops, and by infusing her unending passion for food into an always supple prose – generous, knowledgeable, personal to just the right degree – she manages to kindle our enthusiasms. One finishes her pieces with the sense that the places under consideration have been evoked with a vividness far beyond the confines of ordinary restaurant reviewing. I must go there, I often find myself thinking as I dispatch the Ex to the recycling bin or the charcoal chimney.

For about a decade now, Unterman has been bringing out iterations of the aptly titled San Francisco Food Lover's Guide. The latest edition, the fourth, is published this month by Ten Speed Press ($18.95 paper). The volume does not pretend to be exhaustive; it reflects, instead, Unterman's own interests (wide) and experiences (long) in cooking and eating hereabouts, and in that respect it is a kind of guidebook-essay hybrid. She is a gatekeeper we trust.

Although the new volume is as plumply charming as its predecessors (the most recent of which appeared just two years ago), there are signs of slippage. Mikeytom Market is still listed in outer Noe Valley, though the store closed in June 2003. Tower Market, described as "independent," actually was gobbled up by the Mollie Stone's chain in January. We can still read about Watergate on Valencia Street – yet that restaurant moved to Nob Hill in 2003 while the Valencia space became the value-conscious Watercress. Tartine Bakery, at 18th and Guerrero, is now called Tartine Café – but Tartine Bakery is still Tartine Bakery, while Tartine Café is to be found on Gough near Hayes.

On the plus side, Real Food Company has been dropped from the Noe Valley listings, so whoever was asleep at the wheel was just dozing, not deep in REM-land. We sticklers appreciate that sort of nuance.

Contact Paul Reidinger at paulr@sfbg.com.