Ralph, over the years I’ve put together a Streets and Trips map that contains every restaurant ever recommended by the Sterns – not only from the site but from all their books, newspaper and magazine stories, radio shows – and I use it pretty much as you describe.  If we’re taking a driving trip, I put in the starting and ending points, have it highlight the route, and then zoom in to whatever level I want to find places along the way.  Works very well!

Edit to add: You can also do the same thing with Google Earth.  The automatic download feature of Roadfood works, and Google Earth gives you that same routing capability -actually, it’s even better than Streets and Trips.  I only use Streets and Trips because it would be too much work to move all that non-Roadfood.com data over to Google Earth.