THE CHEZ EDDY LIVING HEART COOKBOOK

Chez Eddy is a Houston restaurant that serves a kind of nouvelle American Southwestern fare, as high-flying as marinated wild boar with plum-port wine sauce, as au courant as radicchio/arugula/jicama/fresh-corn salad with beet vinaigrette— but with one difference you're unlikely to notice without being told (and that's a plus): Conceived by heart-specialist Gotto, the restaurant makes every dish conform to American Heart Association guidelines for fat, cholesterol, sodium, and calories. Obviously, the recipes here are a far cry from the ones in those dreary AHA cookbooks. Though many diet cookbooks make the promise, these dishes—among them escallops of veal with apricot coulis, broiled swordfish with red pepper salsa, tamarind sauce with an unexpected dollop of Marsala wine, vitello tonnato with reduced-calorie mayonnaise cut further with nonfat yogurt, and two cheesecakes (one of ricotta, one nonfat yogurt, both using liqueurs)—really have the pizazz and sumptuous qualities that make a heart-healthy diet easy to maintain. (Of course, calorie-watchers still have to sacrifice in the serving-size department.) And they're not especially demanding of the cook.