Louis Jordan plays a food critic who is blackmailing local restaurateurs into giving him a percentage of their profits in return for favourable television reviews. When one owner tires of the arrangement and threatens to expose him, he is killed off with poisoned wine...
On reflection, this is a rather slowly developed and humourless tale which suffers from a stilted performance from Louis Jordan as the conniving food critic. His best efforts to conjure up the fiendishly plotting villain characterised in the script fail and his scenes with Columbo are consequently indifferent; lacking the typical distinctive charm and vigour.
Additionally, Falk's portrayal of Columbo shows continuing signs of a certain arrogance at the root of the character (evident since "The Last Salute to the Commodore") which grossly conflicts with the strongly-established traits of his seeming absent-mindedness and unassumingness.
There are other more minor quibbles about this story - the pre-murder and actual murder sequences are a little rushed and generally the whole thing could have been done in 70 minutes: the majority of the additional, superfluous sequences which have often contained sufficient comedy and/or revealed detail about the life and personality of Columbo are uncharacteristically moderate.
Two other things to note in the context of the history of the series - this is a rare occasion when Columbo explicitly states that he dislikes the murderer; also, the villain tries to murder Columbo....
A patchy addition to the hugely successful TV series, whose basic premise has significant merits; however, the overlong script and the antagonising performance from Columbo's antagonist are sufficiently off-putting.