Cooking with Class

I love the idea of making food matter more for gaming but to some extent I don't feel like this book exactly delivers. It gives a lot of fluff that I've used in a lot of games but not too much crunch and the crunch that's there never gets used in my games.

On one hand I use the menus and food by region a lot but not much else. It has some great discussions about fluff but you won't be reading this too often or using too much out of it. I'm giving three stars to reflect this.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here. 

Retrospective:

I was excited to get this product and despite disappointment over what it could actually do I wanted food to be a bigger subject in my games but as time went on and the book became less and less used I just forgot about it. Even worse I've already made reviews on my blog that cover similar angles that are vastly superior. Dire Rugrat's Tavern series gives you a lot more bang for your buck in terms of making a resaurant feel alive and giving plot hooks that blend into and work with campaigns. Flaming Crab released a book on food that matters. Heck there's even a fat book that I haven't posted yet that gives you a lot to work with from weapon damage for bar items to new wondrous food items. Cooking with Class is just outclassed on all fronts making it borderline useless. Its easier to replace it with two items which combined are much cheaper and a thousand times better. 

At best there are three prestige classes that do not help in cooking at all and stink of fringe 3.0 design. 

I maintain my three star rating because it's not an inept product. You can get some value out of it and there's no overpowered crunch and some fluff to guide you along, it's just underwhelming and most of what it offers can be handled with a quick google search or some forethought.