On March 5, 2004, as reporters came streaming out of a New York courthouse to tell the world Martha Stewart had been convicted of obstructing justice and lying to investigators, R.W. Apple Jr., was doing what he does best: eating.

Apple, former chief correspondent for The New York Times, now associate editor, was lunching at a fussy restaurant overlooking Central Park when he received the news. Rising from his seat, he stepped from the confines of a semi-private salon into the main dining room, cleared his throat and, in a voice that could stop a clock, announced: "Martha Stewart! Convicted on all counts!" A moment of shocked silence followed as a room full of well-heeled patrons dropped their jaws in a perfect pantomime of Edvard Munch's "The Scream."

R.W. "Johnny" Apple has made it his business to spread "All the News that's Fit to Print" — and then-some — during his 40-plus-year tenure at The New York Times. Having lifted a glass and a fork in his presence on several occasions, allow me to say that the reporter-cum-Renaissance man is at his "Johnniest," a condition widely chronicled outside the New York Times, when he's telling tales at table.

R.W. Apple

At 70, Apple has seen it all and done it all. He's eaten everywhere, met everyone who is anyone and is proud possessor of a sharp mind and even sharper wit. His travels have taken him to 110 countries. He's covered foreign wars and presidential campaigns, politics and the papacy. And since 1997, loyal readers have had the pleasure of waking up and playing "Where's Johnny?" as he's crisscrossed the globe, providing dispatches from the wide world of eating.

His U.S. travels were the catalyst for "Apple's America: The Discriminating Traveler's Guide to 40 Great Cities in the United States and Canada" (North Point Press, $22.50), published last month. Due in town this weekend, Apple admits he doesn't get here often enough, though he's made at least a dozen visits in the past few decades.

"The Seattle scene has changed extraordinarily," he said in a recent phone conversation. "It used to be the Olympic Hotel to stay and Rosellini's to eat, plus a couple of seafood places." Back in the day, he insists, "nobody would have come to Seattle to go to the opera" (something he's done twice). "The art museum was of passing interest. The restaurant scene?" — he pauses for dramatic effect — "Need I say more?"

Apple does say more in "Apple's America," devoting a lengthy chapter to our fair city, touching on its history, its politics, its much-improved arts culture and current love affair with great food and wine. As in each of 40 cities, he offers suggestions for places to stay (the Fairmont Olympic among them) and points readers to his favorite places to eat (Canlis, Dahlia Lounge, Mistral, Le Pichet, Ray's Boathouse, Shiro's and Wild Ginger).

"One of the first things that traveling throughout the country has taught me is how much regionalism persists," says Apple. "Local food traditions can tell you so much about a city." Just as you can't come to Seattle without sampling Dungeness crab and local oysters, he says, "You can't go to Minneapolis and hear Minnesotans talk about fishing, about what it means to them, and then not eat walleye."

Recalling bygone years on the campaign trail (he's covered 19 national conventions and nine presidential elections), the legendary gourmand describes his old "emergency meal," the standing order when dining out across America: shrimp cocktail, a strip steak, baked potato and apple pie accompanied by "a glass of something — if they had something."

These days, he says, there's no city of any consequence without many great restaurants with intriguing menus and creditable wine lists. "Back then you had a lot of trouble going beyond one or two brand names. If you could find a Mondavi wine, that was a big deal."

Too few Americans find the time to cook, notes Apple, who says he is the designated weekend "fish cook" when he's relaxing at one of his three homes with his wife, Betsey. "When Betsey and I are here alone we cook very simply, and as everyone else does, we order-in Chinese or pizza." At the same time that fewer Americans cook, says Apple, more have become interested in food. "That's likely why restaurants have gotten so much better, so quickly," he suggests.

"Restaurants can only be good if they've got a good audience. If they don't have an appreciative group of people eating their meals, encouraging them to push ahead, then they're not going to be good." Impressed by an "explosion" of quality restaurants across the land, Apple says, "It's astonishing to go back and read reviews and see that the expectations of the reviewers — and of the customers — were so low." Twenty-five years ago, "Continental cuisine seemed enough, but the geographical distribution of food styles is so much greater now."

Looking at food trends with the eye (and the waistband) of a well-fed reporter who has eaten his way around the country, he sees "a considerable trend, a continuing trend" toward local ingredients, freshness and seasonality, and he notes America's ongoing fascination with Asian and Latin cuisine. Examining himself as a septuagenarian still hard at work keeping his finger on the world's political pulse while chronicling its foodways, he insists, "Politics, war and diplomacy are a young man's beat, and I've pushed the envelope considerably." Chasing food stories that not only whet his appetite but sate it has been "a fabulous change of pace."

"The main thing I can bring to the task, in addition to some background knowledge and experience, is my belief that writing about food and travel requires as much reportorial intensity as writing about anything else." Food writing, he says, is all too often about the writer's opinion, "but I try to report the hell out of my food stories." By doing so, he insists, "I don't feel like I'm doing a skim-job and coasting by in my declining years. I feel like a journalist, as I've been for the past 50."

Nancy Leson: 206-464-8838 or taste@seattletimes.com