Part food guide to Rome and part love story, Capella`s novel spares no delicious detail in the kitchen or in the bedroom. A young American student sipping coffee at a Trastevere bar catches the eye of a sensuous young waiter. The waiter woos the eager young miss with food, and her appetite for Italian cooking instantly becomes an appetite for the young waiter himself. What the girl doesn`t realize is that the elegant food the waiter serves her comes not from his own hand but from that of his best friend, who harbors his own secret passion for the American student. Foodies will revel in Capella`s lengthy passages describing quasi-military life in the tyrannically run kitchen and snooty dining room of a Michelin-starred eatery run by a ruthless chef. The book`s food scenes give way to sex scenes, which yield in turn to simultaneous sex and food couplings. Coarse, bawdy Italian vulgarisms earn literal English translations in footnotes. Gourmets and romantics both will encounter much entertainment in Capella`s lighthearted first novel.