A city spotlight on Dakar, Senegal’s sultry capital city, where French, Wolof, and North African influence meets local ingredients in the kitchen—and on the street.

Hand-carved pirogues on the beach in Ngor, in Dakar

Perched on the edge of West Africa, Senegal has long gone quietly about its business while its neighbors get into all sorts of trouble. Quietly, of course, is a misleading word in the context of Dakar, the sultry capital city and dust-ridden domain of all-night music clubs, infamous traffic, relentless hustlers, and nonstop construction, where the dead silence of night is regularly punctured by soaring muezzin calls to mosque.

And then there’s the food. Among other...

On the Caribbean island of Antigua, you hear the word “water” used to describe many a local dish—conch water, cockle (clam) water, goat water. But fear not: Watery broths these are not. Preparations vary, but chances are you’ll receive a very flavorful soup or even stew highlighting the featured ingredient. Goat water, a rich, hearty stew with notes of clove and cinnamon, was one of our favorites, especially this one, found in an unexpected place: a beach bar crawling with souvenir hawkers and day-tripping cruise shippers up from St. John’s, the Antiguan capital.

It was the type of place we might usually shun, but instead we went there twice—first at the behest of the Jamaican...

We’re a little obsessed with Georgian food lately. In Brooklyn, we nearly split our pants eating the simple, rich cuisine, in meals bookmarked by addictive soupy meat dumplings (khinkali) and buttery cheese-stuffed bread (khachapuri). While cruising Turkey’s Black Sea coastline last fall for hazelnuts and pide, we were tempted to just keep on driving to Tbilisi, to conduct our own taste tests of the two countries’ various dolmas (stuffed  vegetables), one of several dishes reflecting the countries’ shared Ottoman heritage. So when Anna, a Georgian friend in New Jersey, offered to cook us a homemade Georgian feast last month, we naturally accepted without hesitation.

The spread...

“You don’t get a true representation of terroir by buying fruit from Ontario and adding a French yeast. A great wine is grown, not made in the winery—that’s the only way to get a true taste of the landscape.” –Emmanuel Maniadakis, owner of Verger Biologique Maniadakis

Tell us about what you do.
I grow certified-organic, biodynamic  apples and pears; I make a certified-organic, biodynamic apple ice wine, a pear ice wine, and a still cider (apple wine) with no manipulation, using natural indigenous yeasts and natural filtration, no sulfates added. It’s the only natural wine in all of North America recognized by Nicolas Joly and his group of natural wine makers in France (le...

We’re happy to announce we’ve just released our second destination guide on Kindle! The Amsterdam Food & Travel Guide includes all 24 of the local foods and drinks we scouted out in the Dutch capital, plus a bonus five-day EYW itinerary and restaurant guide. Like our existing London guide, it’s conveniently downloadable to your Kindle, smartphone, or tablet for just $2.99.

Check it out on Amazon!

About the Amsterdam Food & Travel Guide: “Dutch food hasn’t exactly inspired the poetic waxings of many—and in well-touristed Amsterdam, it’s especially easy to wander into the wrong place and miss out on the city’s unique culinary offerings. For this guide, Eat Your World identifies...

The canals, the coffee shops, the appeltaarts—Amsterdam is one heck of a city to visit, and when Scott and I were there in the fall of 2011, we thought, The more the merrier. We rented an apartment with five good friends, we gave them a taste of our crazy Eat Your World scavenger-hunt lifestyle (“jenever tasting followed by kroketten, everyone”); we museum-hopped, noshed at markets, biked past windmills, and drank a whole lot of good local beer. And they got us to go clubbing. Everyone won!

Our brief Amsterdam-highlights reel hardly conveys the magic of wandering into just the right neighborhood deli on a crowded weekend morning, or lingering over an incredible season-driven meal...

Our immediate impressions of Tiwai Island, a wildlife sanctuary/research facility and community-led conservation initiative in Sierra Leone’s southeast, weren’t the best: Here we found ourselves on a hot, buggy tropical island in the isolated Moa River, with two very quiet nights ahead. The common area for guests, a large domed, open-sided solar-powered hut in the middle of a forest clearing, offered little distraction other than an information board and a few wooden tables. Same for the simple wood-roofed platforms, each holding one or two tents, dotting the clearing’s perimeter. Scott and I had been relatively unplugged since arriving in Sierra Leone a week and a half earlier, but...

*Update: This giveaway has closed. Congrats to our winner, Sam!

For this new giveaway, one randomly selected reader will receive a shipment of Saffron Road’s delicious Crunchy Chickpeas (one each of the three flavors), plus coupons for the prepared-food brand’s other all-natural, halal, gluten-free world-cuisine snacks. Simply tell us your favorite Indian dish in the comments section to be in the running!

Saffron Road recently approached us about doing a giveaway on EYW, and we said, sure—so long as we like the product we’re giving away. We already knew we liked the prepared-food brand’s philosophy: Foods are all-natural and halal-certified; several are gluten-free; small,...

The typical spread, at City Market in Luling, Texas

A meat-eater does not visit Central Texas—eclectic state capital Austin included—without making BBQ a priority. But what is BBQ, that most regional and fiercely beloved of American dishes, here? It’s a holy trinity of smoked brisket, pork ribs, and sausage, slow-cooked over big oak-fed pits in the manner introduced to the area—primarily to the towns of Lockhart, Luling, and Taylor, each within about an hour’s drive from Austin—in the mid-19th century by German and Czech settlers, who’d often smoke leftover cuts of meat from their butcher shops. The Texans loved it, took to calling it BBQ, and adopted the style as their...

Our latest city spotlight turns north to Montréal, where French-Québécois comfort food meets cosmopolitan nose-to-tail dining, innovative microbreweries, and old-school Jewish classics.

The flower market outside Marché Atwater

Montréal, just 330 miles north of New York City, is an increasingly exciting place to be, whether it’s live music, cultural festivals, contemporary art, boutique shopping, or food and drink you’re after. We are predisposed to favor the latter, naturally, and Canada’s second-largest city, with its ethnic diversity and rich (if tumultuous) Franco- and Anglophone history, does not disappoint. Start by exploring the most regional of Québécois foods—the meat...

Egg creams are perhaps my favorite thing to insist that visitors to New York try, because no one ever knows what the hell they are—in fact, I know far too many residents here who aren’t familiar with them! The first point to clarify is that there are no eggs in an egg cream, nor is there cream. That’s an important distinction, as many people are immediately turned off by the drink’s name. (Which doesn’t make sense in a country that loves Cadbury creme eggs, but I suppose it is a fear of consuming raw eggs.)

It’s not clear why they are called egg creams or who exactly invented them, though it was most likely a Jew, probably in Brooklyn. A few years ago, The New York Times outlined...

On Antigua, knowledge is power when seeking island cuisine, as the tourism industry and an apparent weekends-only policy conspire to keep some local dishes just out of reach.

On the Caribbean island of Antigua last weekend, our local-food queries were most frequently greeted with:

“Local food? Saturday only.”

 “You have to go to someone’s home. Or to the little spots in St. John’s.”

“Hmmm….” [cue squinty  thinking face]

It’s true we hadn’t done our own usual research. This trip, a long weekend ensconced in a quiet beachfront apartment on Antigua’s northwest shore, was a “babymoon” of sorts—that final relaxing trip before the new addition arrives, in just over two months...

There’s a reason why our Destination sections include detailed info about both What to Eat and How to Burn It Off: For all the fried chicken and rich curries and regional hot dogs we feature on these pages as EYW founders, Scott and I are generally healthy eaters and regular exercisers who’ve learned to indulge in moderation. Turns out we might have taken a cue from a renowned chef or two, as nobody knows the good food–good health balancing act quite as intimately as one who cooks and eats and tastes for a living—and still manages to keep fit. Such is the topic of a new book by journalist Allison Adato, Smart Chefs Stay Slim.

Allison interviewed more than three dozen top chefs for...

Taquitos from San Juan Capistrano, CA

In response to our recent newsletter-announced giveaway, we have had lots of great user uploads lately—spanning regional foods from New Zealand and San Francisco, The Gambia and Cambodia (fried spiders, anyone?)—but could choose only two to be our winners. Our methods were decidedly unscientific and old-school: written on paper, thrown into a hat, and chosen at random.

Congratulations to users Jessie and Liaht, whose uploads from SoCal (Jessie’s, at top) and Paris (Liaht’s, below) were the two lucky submissions drawn! They’ll each win a $25 gift card to Amazon.com, which we’ll email over later today.

Be the first to hear about similar...

I have a weak spot for hot chocolate in the winter—and now that my selection of quaffable vices is limited by pregnancy, man, do I have a weak spot for hot chocolate. Many afternoons I’ll go out hunting for one around 3pm, or I’ll make some at home. If I’m feeling naughty, I’ll accept a dollop of whipped cream or throw some marshmallows into my steaming, milky cup.

But how could I have forgotten about churros?

In the Spanish world, churros—those thin, fluted, deep-fried pastries—and hot chocolate go together like milk and cookies in the United States. Opinion is divided over who, exactly, invented churros (Spanish shepherds? Portuguese sailors via the Chinese?), but it’s safe to...

Every summer, Cape Cod is among our favorite go-to escapes, a long weekend with local friends for which we’re always in for lots of boating, clamming, lobstering, swimming, and, of course, eating. (As we’ve previously admitted, however, we are pretty bad about working when we’re in this area.) New Year’s weekend marked our first winter trip to the Cape, and it proved a long-overdue visit with its snowy conservation lands and starkly beautiful shores, transformed by snowdrifts and the absence of tourists. Of course, we spent a lot of time indoors, and when we weren’t in front of the fireplace, we were in the kitchen.

Wintry Wellfleet, Cape Cod

Hiking the woods in East...

In the year since Scott and I launched Eat Your World, we’ve pointedly made this site about the food and the travel, and not about us—a stance that will continue in the new year, especially as we bring in more contributors for our destination and blog coverage. However, lots of other sites have expressed interest in knowing the two of us better, and we’ve obliged in a series of interviews here and there, all of which we post on our Press page.

But in case you missed them and have wondered how the idea for EYW came about or where our favorite destinations are, firstly, sorry for never telling you here (!), and secondly, please check out the two most recent Q&As we’ve done, with Party...

This week, Eat Your World turns one year old. And while we’d like to say that we cut our teeth sometime between our write-up in the New York Times last January, publishing what’s likely the first-ever guide to Sierra Leonean food and travel this summer, and releasing our first eBook on Amazon.com last week, there is so very much more we’d like to do and accomplish in the coming year—beyond continuing our mission to document and celebrate the world’s regional foods, destination by destination (we’re up to 125+ cities total now, 36 of which are covered in depth by EYW staff). Like what, you ask?

--Launch a new “filter by restaurant” function (coming in January!)

--Build a mobile...

Every so often, a dish or drink is so beloved, so synonymous with a place that we just have to pay it a little extra mind.

Poutine. The mere thought of it gives you a guilty thrill, doesn’t it? The idea of going to a city where it’s perfectly acceptable—indeed, expected—to plop yourself down at 2am and brazenly order a giant plate of French fries smothered in cheese curds and brown gravy speaks loudly to our inner gluttons. It says, Go to Montreal. Now.

In New Jersey, where I grew up, it’s also a common thing to go to a late-night diner and gorge on such alcohol-soaker foods. Greasy eggs were always a favorite order, as were “disco fries,” or cheese fries with gravy. What I...

In a new series of city spotlights, we’ll sum up in quick bloggy format the essential dishes of destinations we cover in full elsewhere. Think of them as teasers, or perhaps appetizers for more! First up is one of our more recently covered cities, New Haven, Connecticut, an iconic pizza town with some hidden gems to boot.

The New Haven Green

New Haven has an affinity for the old. This is, after all, a nearly 375-year-old New England city, with all the usual hallmarks: an Ivy League university (Yale); ­a spacious Puritan-constructed downtown “green,” or grassy town square; graceful if peeling Victorian architecture; even a nickname after trees (Elm City). Fortunately, that respect...

It’s so simple, yet so easy to screw up: Making rice is at the heart of Japanese cuisine, and our friend Megumi recently shared with us exactly how it should be done, as well as instructions for making vinegared sushi rice and temaki, or hand-rolled sushi. All photos by Trix Rosen, copyright 2012.

A basic salmon temaki

The Japanese are rice eaters. Traditionally we eat cooked, short-grain rice almost every day.  So we are very fussy about rice: its freshness, texture, firmness, softness, flavor, moisture, size, and shininess. Good rice is grown in the areas where the water is fresh and clean. Of course, the fresher, the better! The new crop that arrives in the market every fall...

In honor of what’s being called Giving Tuesday, here’s the second of our two Hurricane Sandy posts (see our Jersey Shore post here), in which we provide resources for relief concerning the damaged coastal communities of NYC.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that Manhattan is an island, embraced by three rivers and a bay, and the outer boroughs of New York City extend into the Atlantic, with beaches and boardwalks just like the rest of the Northeast shoreline. Following Hurricane Sandy’s destructive path through the area, however, everyone was reminded of this with a vengeance, via heartbreaking reports of whole neighborhoods destroyed—flooded, washed out to sea, even burned to the...

Like music, food is amazingly transportive. One lick of a lemon ice takes me right back to my front yard in summer, standing barefoot and breathless after chasing down the ice-cream truck; one bite of a pork roll and cheese sandwich and I’m back in my school cafeteria on Tuesdays, a.k.a. Taylor ham day. Humans are sentimental beings, and the power of memory is strong—and decidedly rosy in color, which explains why I can easily overlook pork roll’s insane saltiness on the rare occasions I eat it now.

Photo by Larry D. Moore, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

For this same reason, countless Americans are now mourning a snack food they haven’t eaten, or even thought...

What we’re reading this week in the worlds of food, travel, and beyond.

Beef on weck from Buffalo, New York

Death of a Twinkie: What’s a Trash Foodie to Do Without Hostess?
Hostess declared bankruptcy today, and the Web’s since been aflutter with various bemoanings of loss and happy farewells to the bakery’s famously processed guilty (childhood) pleasures. Smithsonian.com wonders whether this is an excuse for “overblown nostalgia,” a sad day for iconic American snack foods, or a victory for the nation’s general health.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them?
From BBC News Magazine, a brief but fascinating history of the three-meals-a-day we’ve come to accept...

Point Pleasant boardwalk in winter, circa 1998

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, I find my sympathies torn between two places I hold near and dear: New York City—particularly those devastated areas of Brooklyn, near where we used to live, and Queens, where we live now—and the Jersey Shore, where I grew up in the town of Brick. While we’ve been able to physically volunteer only in Queens thus far, and have donated funds to these areas (and certain individuals) specifically, mostly I’ve just helplessly watched the awful TV and web footage, listened sympathetically to the stories of friends and family members more directly affected, and wondered what else I—among the lucky ones who...

We asked for regional-pizza photos, and we got them, from Italy and Connecticut to Turkey and Vietnam. But we can choose only three winners, so it’s with great pleasure that we announce the following:

Pizza rossa

How good does this look? It’s fresh pizza rossa from Rome, and it sounds as good as it looks, thanks to pizzaquixote’s apt description.

Vietnamese pizza

Now this you don’t see every day. But pizza it is, and we’re grateful to ja3ja3 for alerting us to this sweet, spicy, and tangy creation in Ho Chi Minh City. We want some!
 

Pizza margherita, Roman style

Our third winning entry comes from Rome too, just one of three great, descriptive pizza entries...

Diving into the crowded Spice Bazaar in Istanbul (with some gratuitous product placement, natch)

It’s true we’re biased toward food markets, but the Grand Bazaar—with its expensive gold jewelry, leather jackets, and endless rows of mass-produced evil-eye tchotchkes—just wasn’t our thing. Much more fun and interactive was the Misir Çarsisi, or Spice Bazaar, a.k.a. the Egyptian market, established in Eminönü in 1664 (it once specialized in goods brought from Egypt). It’s the market you walk smack into if you approach the Old City from the Galata Bridge, as we did most days from our home base in Karaköy.

Over the years, the spice market has become plenty tourist-friendly; in fact...

What we’re reading this week in the worlds of food, travel, and beyond.

One of our top burgers in the U.S.: the Cherry Cricket’s green-chile burger, in Denver

The Island Where People Forget to Die
Read this article, from the The New York Times Magazine, and you’ll be packing to move to Ikaria, a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea where diet and lifestyle—waking naturally, working in the garden, lunching late, napping, visiting with neighbors at sunset for gossip and wine—conspire to keep many of its residents living healthfully well into their 90s and beyond. 

The Wicked Coast
In The Atlantic, Paul Theroux makes a case for getting to know coastal Maine in winter, when the...

“Merhaba. Findik?” I made the motion of eating something. After one week of travel in Turkey, my Turkish had not improved a whole lot.

Three of the men at the roadside table looked blankly at me, but one caught my drift. He said something rapidly in Turkish and pointed vaguely down the dusty, barren road. I was doubtful but pretended I understood, thanked him profusely, and directed Scott, behind the wheel in our rental car, down the street.

There was only one storefront among the garages that it could possibly be. I repeated my terrible Turkish to the man standing in front of it. He nodded, turned away, and returned to the doorway with cupped hands. They were filled with...

Thin-sliced beef. Tomato sauce. Melted butter. Such is the holy trinity of the Iskender kebab, a.k.a. the döner kebab on crack—and one of the best things we’ve eaten thus far in Istanbul.

Of course I’m exaggerating (not about the crack part, because this is an easily addictive dish). There are two other key components to this kebab: Under the meat is a bed of cut-up flatbread, ensuring none of the sauce goes unsoaked, and off to the side is a pile of thick yogurt, imparting the perfect creamy, cooling balance to every bite. A few tomatoes and blackened green peppers add color to the plate, as well as winking vegetal presence. It’s not all meat and fat!

This kebab has its origins...

Some favorite links this week in the worlds of food, travel, and beyond.
Note: This will be our last installment for a few weeks, while we travel
around Turkey.

Wikipedia/Moon_Cakes

In Focus: Oktoberfest 2012
Via The Atlantic, 34 photos of good times and hefty beers at Munich’s 179^th Oktoberfest, happening now through October 7. Gotta love the passed-out revelers “resting” in the park.

5 Best Mooncakes for 2012 – The Good, the Pretty and the Weird
In anticipation of this weekend’s Mid-Autumn Festival, we admit to being a little moon cake-crazy right now (have you heard about our moon cake contest?). But we’re new to moon cakes and still learning of their many regional (and...

While we cannot say we’ve never had a bad slice, pizza is one of the world’s great satisfactions. It’s that very rare dish for which this can be said: Even when mediocre, it’s still kinda good. It still manages to placate, still comforts that part of your soul that will always long for hot melty cheese and tomato sauce intermingled on oven-baked bread.   

We each grew up in New Jersey, where good thin-crust pizza abounds. The mom-and-pop pizzerias our respective families frequented were reliably delicious, and greasy $2 boardwalk slices never failed to hit the spot, even when it wasn’t 2 a.m.  Now we’re spoiled in New York City, where even the closest neighborhood joint will turn out...

It’s been a while, admittedly, since we chose a new User of the Month. We blame the summer and its many distractions! Now that the air has cooled, it’s time to get back to business. Our latest User of the Month—for October, awarded a bit early—is andresa! He’s based in Switzerland but gets around quite a bit, as evidenced by his contributions from Germany, Iceland, Iran, the Pacific Northwest, and more. Good beer is clearly a passion of his, comprising more than half of his shots, as is photography—his photos are downright stunning. (Check out some of his beer pics, like this one, and the Swiss Schümli Pflümli pictured above.)

The Food Memory we’ve chosen to highlight this month...

Better late than never? Our favorite links last week from the worlds of travel and food.

History: Power Lunches
We love this overview in The Paris Review (by Jamie Feldmar) of so-called power lunches’ role in New York City history, from the business/finance variety at classic Delmonico’s to the Algonquin Hotel’s famed literary Round Table (the buttery, iconic Delmonico steak is pictured above).

The Evolution of World Travel—and the World Itself—Over the Past 25 Years
From Conde Nast Traveler, celebrating its 25th anniversary, here are some fun facts about travel in the past two and half decades via an impressive interactive infographic.

Catching the Gist
Jessica Colley...

The buildup starts on the long drive north. There’s traffic getting out of the city, traffic in Connecticut—where we might stop for pizza in New Haven—and traffic navigating around Providence, Rhode Island. But we’re giddy with anticipation for what’s always our favorite weekend of the summer, when we visit dear friends on Cape Cod.

For the past 10 years, we have been fortunate to have insider access to the Cape and its endless nooks and crannies. Our friends there share our love for adventure, but even better, they have the skills and means of making our wildest summer dreams come true. Over the years these have included: spontaneous flights to Nantucket, catching and grilling...

In our ongoing series of travel/food-blogger Q&As, we meet Andrea Spirov of Inspiring Travellers, which she runs with her partner, John, out of Norway (for now). Their blog aims to inspire others to get up and see the world, and of course seeing is also eating—there’s plenty of food coverage on their site as well. Check out their EYW profile for some of their favorite regional dishes, from Jordan to Australia.

Andrea and John in Cartagena

Tell us a little about your site, and what inspired you to start it.
The goal of our site is to inspire people to travel. We were travelers long before we started the blog, but when we decided to take a yearlong sabbatical we thought it might...

Some favorite links this week in the worlds of food, travel, and cooking.

Serious Eats: Everything Sandwiches
We are loving the National Sandwich Month coverage over on Serious Eats—it’s inspiring us not only to go out and try new sammies but also to experiment more at home (avocado and sardine sandwich, anyone?). Pictured above is one of our own all-time favorites, Austin’s chopped beef sandwich.

IstanbulFood’s Picks
In research mode for our upcoming trip to Turkey, we’re spending lots of time perusing our favorite blogs from the area, including IstanbulFood. We’re already dreaming of this breakfast on the Bosphorus…

The New Yorker: Learning How to Eat
Musings on teaching...

We recently had the pleasure of cooking one evening with our friend Megumi, who shared with us these favorite warm-weather recipes from Japan. Both are very simple and fresh-tasting, perfect for the dog days of summer. Below she describes each in her own words.

Hiyayakko (Cold Tofu)

Tofu was one of the foods we ate almost every day when I was a child. Back then it was not mass-produced, and there were many local tofu makers. My mother bought fresh tofu every morning from a neighborhood grocery store, often using it for miso soup. But on a hot summer day, we had hiyayakko as a side dish for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. This remains one of the most popular tofu side dishes enjoyed...

We first arrived to Freetown via water taxi from the airport, a bumpy adventure in the pitch-black night. Our brief drive through the western part of town revealed a city in full Friday-night revelry: unruly streets, overflowing clubs, and candlelit food vendors, their flickering orange flames extending down the road before us. After 10 days of travel, we returned to the capital via car in the middle of the day and witnessed another, equally chaotic Freetown. On Kissy Road and Sani Abacha Street, the cars compete for space with a smattering of motorbikes and loads of merchandise, but mostly just an inordinate amount of people, going about their daily business. We captured some of it...

What we’re reading, cooking, and watching this week in the worlds of food, travel, and beyond.

Summer squash, polenta, feta cheese

Tour of Flushing with Jason Wang of Xi'an Famous Foods and Biang!
We are biased, of course, because we live in Queens, but articles about eating out in Flushing, our borough’s chaotic Chinatown, never, ever get old. There are just too many gems in the neighborhood! On our next visit, we’ll seek out some of these, from Serious Eats New York. NYC tourists: You should too!

Taco Bell’s Sophisticated Side
File this one under “positive baby steps in the fast-food industry”: With its Cantina Bell line, Taco Bell, with a nod to Chipotle, is trying for...

Biking in Oaxaca

Eat Your World never tells you What to Eat without also telling you How to Burn It Off. But sometimes hiking and biking just doesn’t cut it, and we need more strength-building exercises in the mix. Of course, we rarely have access to a hotel gym and are often pressed for time when we travel. So we usually find ourselves doing push-ups and squats in our room—and there are hardly two more effective moves out there.

Now, we’re not official experts (more on this below), but we’ve spent a combined five decades in gyms—we both started pretty young!—and I, for one, have spent a few years perfecting the art of working out at home when I’m too lazy to ride the subway to...

Some favorite links this week in the worlds of food, travel, cooking, and beyond.  

“Red Sauce Diaries: When More is More”: We’re enjoying Roads & Kingdoms’ red-sauce reports from Sicily. In the latest post, Matt Goulding discovers surprising overlap in Sicilian and Italian-American cuisine when it comes to “more is more.” (Pictured above: The best chicken parm we’ve had in recent memory, from New York City’s Parm.)

“Edible Fermentables: Wine, Beer, Cheese, Meat”: We’ve encountered our share of fermented foods in our travels, most recently in West Africa (see foofoo), but of course fermentation plays an essential role in all the wine and beer we imbibe rather, uh, frequently....

Maggi stock cubes—rich with sodium, MSG, and hydrogenated fats—are ubiquitous in West African cooking. Meet the nutritious traditional seasonings they’re replacing.

Groundnut soup, Sierra Leone

At a beautiful eco-resort on Sierra Leone’s Freetown Peninsula this spring, Scott and I were invited to tag along for the weekly run to the local market. On the shopping list was everything from groundnuts (peanuts) and pineapple to bread and eggs, and Maggi. I didn’t think anything of the flavoring agent, figuring the stock cubes were thrown into a few of the local stews as a base. But a large pack was purchased for the week, and at the market, it was clearly a popular item. We soon...

We asked for some inspiration from South America, and, with entries from Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, and Brazil, we definitely got it.

But we had to choose one winner, and kept going back to a beautiful bowl of soup. Our winning entry comes from pauletteh86, who uploaded this gorgeous photo of mondongo, a traditional Colombian soup that includes pork, chorizo, tripe, potatoes, cilantro, avocado, and cumin. She also uploaded a Food Memory that elaborated on this dish—not a requirement of the contest, but we loved reading about her own personal relationship (or “affair,” as she calls it) with mondongo.

Felicidades, Paulette! She wins a copy of Lonely Planet’s inspirational...

We’re avoiding the news during the day and spending an inordinate amount of time on the couch most nights, which can mean only one thing: We’re in the thick of Olympics fever! Does the TV coverage make you want to take up swimming immediately? Are you admiring the athletic builds while rethinking those three pizza slices you called dinner? Do those stunning pans over the Thames make you want to go to London, stat?

We can help you with that last one, at least, by further tempting you (via food, of course) with our latest contribution to Serious Eats, “London: 10 Must-Eat British Foods During the Olympics.” Whether you visit during the Games or after, these 10 favorites, culled from...

In our ongoing series of travel/food-blogger Q&As, we meet the traveling duo behind Still Served Warm, Ambra and Alec. She’s Italian; he’s Californian; they’re both obsessed with gelato. Their shared passions for travel and food have taken them around the world. See their EYW profile here.

Tell us a little about your site, and what inspired you to start it.
We were on a road trip through Tuscany and fell in love with gelato. We wanted to learn more about the creative process and the artistry, so we spent hours talking with the owners. When we were finished, we wanted a way to pay them back for their time and generosity as well as reward their excellence. On top of that, we both...

View from the road in Popenguine

When Scott and I travel for Eat Your World, it’s hardly relaxing. Before even getting to a destination, our minds are already swimming with loads of pre-trip research, we know what foods we’re tracking down and where, and we have a game plan—a soft itinerary of sorts, which always changes upon arrival—of how we might go about squeezing it all into our limited travel time. Once in town, we run around eating and drinking and writing and hiking as much as humanly possible. Sure, it’s the best kind of stuff to busy yourself with—and, in truth, we’d be doing it on a smaller scale even without the website—but it’s also pretty exhausting.

Which is why...

Find a good sticky toffee pudding between Olympic events!

Maybe you are among the lucky few (OK, millions) who have scored tickets to the 2012 Summer Olympics, or maybe you’re just heading to London to spectate and soak up the infectious camaraderie that will flood the city by the July 27 starting date. In either case, you won’t want to travel too far from the main venues and viewing areas—and you’ll have to eat. Why not celebrate the host city this year by eating good, authentic British food at EYW-approved restaurants, cafes, and markets near the Games’ hot spots?

As a special London 2012 offer, we’re slashing the price of our new London City Guide—30 pages of quintessential...

Our newest User of the Month is [drum roll, please]…noonie! She’s based in Brooklyn but has been getting around quite a bit, uploading food pics spanning Montreal and Greece, Paris and Tulum, Mexico. She shows a talent for finding lighter takes of regional classics, like the bread-less lobster “roll” pictured above, from Amagansett-Montauk, NY. (Guess there’s not much lightening up to be done about Cincinnati chili though, huh?)

The Food Memory of the Month we’ve selected—“Losing It,” by rsg10—details the personal experience of losing, and then regaining a year later, the senses of smell and taste. We can only imagine what that first meal post-surgery must feel like, with all...

The latest in our series of travel/food-blogger Q&As takes us to Abu Dhabi,
home base for Jenn Garcia-Alonso, co-founder of The Purple Passport (ThePurplePassport.com). Jenn travels far and wide to create “best of the best” urban travel guides for various cities around the globe, which always, of course, involves a healthy dose of local food. See her EYW profile here.

Tell us a little about your site, and what inspired you to start it.
The Purple Passport (www.thepurplepassport.com) is a web-based collection of chic, one-stop-shop guides to experiencing the world’s cities in style. The inspiration for the site came from my own travels with my best friend, Emily C. Brands; we have...

It isn’t every day you’re treated to a historic culinary spectacle while waiting for breakfast—and yet that’s what you get every time you walk into Montreal’s St.-Viateur Bagel. There’s the aproned employee rolling out the dough, effortlessly forming each piece into its telltale skinny shape. There’s another one briefly boiling the soft rings in honeyed water. When he’s done he puts them on a long, narrow wooden slab with a handle, which acts as a giant spatula to deposit and later retrieve the bagels from the antique wood-fired oven. From there they’re deposited on a chute, where they await, hot and fresh, for the next customer. And so on, again and again. Twenty-four hours a day,...

Last spring, North India provided one of our most memorable eating experiences, especially within the walled confines of Old Delhi, where, among the dilapidated surrounds and overall crush of humanity, each delicious bite felt like a small victory. When BootsnAll Travel recently approached us about doing a blog-post exchange, it was the first destination that sprung to mind, as we fear it is all too easy for a visitor to be overwhelmed enough by Old Delhi’s madness to miss out on eating really, really well there.

And so our top-10-foods list was born, in this post that went live on BootsnAll today. Hopefully our mouth-watering photos (like the paratha pictured above) and...

You’ve likely heard about Asheville, North Carolina by now—how it’s chock-full of eclectic, farm-to-table restaurants; how it was just voted Beer City U.S.A. for the fourth year running; or perhaps how its spectacular surroundings recently provided the on-location setting for The Hunger Games. In fact, a few days in this small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains is hardly enough to satisfy all the hiking, eating, drinking, and even zip-lining you’ll want to do here. But, hey, we had to at least try. Here’s our one minute of living the good life in Asheville.

Find out more about what to eat, how to burn it off, and where to stay in Asheville. 

Our friends at Lonely Planet are always working to inspire travelers, and they’re usually quite successful. And so it is with LP’s beautiful 1,000 Ultimate Experiences book, a hefty 700 pages of 1,000 globe-spanning travel ideas, activities, and images that will have you adding to—and revising, and adding to again—your lifetime travel bucket list.

At Eat Your World we likewise aim to inspire—specifically via drool-worthy photos of foods from around the world—and we look to our users to inspire us. Thus our newest contest is born: Upload a photo or story of local food/drink from South America, and you could win a copy of LP’s 1,000 Ultimate Experiences book, courtesy of Lonely...

In the spirit of building an online community of global travelers and local eaters, we’re happy to announce a new series of Q&As with travel and food bloggers we’ve come to know through their contributions to Eat Your World. Our first subject is the duo behind Backpack ME (bkpk.me), Ashray Baruah and Zara Quiroga, whose (respective) Indian and Portuguese backgrounds yield distinct perspectives not often encountered in the travel blogosphere. One thing they share in common? A love of local cuisine. (Check out their EYW profile for proof!)

Tell us a little about your site, and what inspired you to start it.
We used to live in Dubai, and after a few years there we got really tired...

To celebrate the onset of June tomorrow, we have a new user of the month, ladies and gents, and his (user) name is ssoloman! Check him out: From Australia to Berlin, where he’s based, he has been pretty active lately on the food-pic front, and always writes great descriptions to boot. Pictured above is his currywurst upload (is it just me or does it resemble a crustacean?), but our favorite from him just might be this one of sekuwa, or “local chicken,” from Nepal. 

The Food Memory we’ve chosen to highlight this month, submitted by bobmali70 (who might also win an award for best user name), reminds us that often it’s the unpleasant meals that prove the most memorable. In “

White clam pie from Frank Pepe’s

Last week in New Haven, Connecticut, we met the great-grandson of the man credited with inventing “hamburger sandwiches” in the U.S., the grandson of the creator of New Haven-style pizza, and the daughter of the couple responsible for introducing calzones to Americans. These people weren’t hard to find—in fact, they’re still making burgers, pizza, and calzones in their respective restaurants, just as their ancestors did before them.

You might not know if you don’t ask around, especially if you came here only for the pizza. New Haven is rightly celebrated for having great pizza. And though we’ll loudly sing its praises soon enough on this...

It’s not uncommon these days to see a city’s best local foods represented in its sports stadiums: Tony Luke’s iconic cheesesteak in Philly’s Citizens Bank Park, Shake Shack burgers in New York’s Citifield, peach cobbler in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome. But we were still pleasantly surprised with the offerings we saw this weekend at Marlins Park, the brand-new high-tech home of the Miami (née Florida) Marlins. Despite resembling a futuristic alien spacecraft, with its gleaming-white exterior and cool retractable roof, the stadium goes the extra mile to spotlight cuisine reflective of the multi-culti coastal city’s roots—and even those of the visiting team.

Along the perimeter of the...

We just announced our new contest winner and want to give the Food Memory we selected some airtime on the EYW Blog, too.

User alexfhalpern wrote the winning entry, entitled “We Came to Eat Fish.” Why do we love this story? As we noted on the Contests page, it’s a well-written tale of a basic grilled fish dish enjoyed on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, but like elsewhere in Africa, it’s not just about the food: It’s about the energy of the setting, the sheer “life force” of the lake, humming with those who depend on it for survival and play. It’s about the pride of the Kenyans who brought the author there, four hours out of the way, to feast on fish. It’s about food’s...

If you had to choose one quintessential dish to represent your hometown, what would it be?

This is a question we at Eat Your World ask ourselves, and everyone we meet, all the time—though we ultimately step it up from one dish to, say, 40. (We never said we were completely sane.) It’s a question we relish asking again and again for every new place we visit, each answer a unique culinary discovery we couldn’t have made anywhere else.

We started, of course, with our own hometowns, both original and adopted: the Jersey Shore and New York City, respectively. In New Jersey I loved revisiting the pork roll and cheese sandwich—at one point my favorite school-cafeteria lunch, I must...

Somewhere between waking up to peaceful lagoon views; swimming in a warm, empty sea before breakfast; and feasting on spicy pumpkin stew at lunch, I started to wonder: Why isn’t this place swarmed with tourists?

View of lagoon from bungalow, Tribewanted, John Obey beach

I could guess the answer—this was Sierra Leone, the tiny corner of West Africa best known for an ugly slavery history, a decade-long civil war (1991-2002), and the violent thriller Blood Diamond—but it still didn’t make sense. As I surveyed pristine John Obey beach, where Scott and I stayed our first few nights at eco-tourism venture Tribewanted, the word “paradise” easily sprung to mind.

John Obey beach,...

A few days in Prague are hardly enough to soak up the medieval romance, abundant history, and vast amounts of beer for which the city is known. But try we did last October, when we hit the ground to round up all the tasty underappreciated Czech food we could. Some important things learned: 1. Autumnal, leaf-blanketed Prague is a beautiful time to be there. 2. Old Town is remarkably peaceful in the rain. 3. There will always be Dixieland on the Charles Bridge (Karluv most).

One of many temples to dibi, or grilled meat, in Dakar, this dibiterie boasts a cult-like status in the capital: It’s said to be musician Youssou N’Dour’s favorite, dispensing inexpensive, expertly prepared food at all hours in suitably questionable hygienic conditions. After hearing the place reverentially spoken about by more than one trusted expat, we knew we had to find it.

Problem is, nobody had any clue where it was. Armed with limited directions— “somewhere near the Sandaga bus station”—and even more limited French, we wandered the dusky streets around the area marché, or market, where hours earlier we’d elbowed our way through crowds of sellers. Now it was quiet, empty but...

It’s April 16, which means: It’s National Eggs Benedict Day!* But also: We have a new User and Food Memory of the Month!

This time around we’ve selected Jessie as our User of the Month, and one glance at her profile illustrates why: The girl gets around! To date she’s contributed 21 food pics, from Guatemala to Sweden to Syria, always with detailed descriptions. Most recently she put Bolivia on the map for us, adding foods traditional to La Paz and Santa Cruz, including the colorful queso humacha shown above.

Our new Food Memory of the Month is “The Kindness of Strangers in the Seychelles,” by spiceboxtravels (who blogs about food and travel at Spiceboxtravels.com). It’s a story...

“Beer and spirits were an essential part of everyday life for the first European settlers of our country. Malting barley was brought over on the first ships with other essentials, like wool and wheat. Records show it was first planted on Martha’s Vineyard in 1604. I would like to eventually grow and malt the original variety of barley that was grown in New England.”—Andrea Stanley, Valley Malt

Tell us about your job.
I am a maltster: I malt grains for brewing and distilling. The process
of malting starts with soaking grain, sprouting it, and drying it. It takes one full week to malt a batch of grain, and we malt in 2,000-pound (one-ton) batches. We started in 2010 with one malting...

Yesterday we arrived home in New York City after three extraordinary weeks traveling around West Africa. (We apologize for the spotty on-the-road updates here: Wifi was not easy to come by for most of the trip.) We have loads of written and visual content to organize and post on EYW, including two full local-food sections for Senegal and Sierra Leone (pictured above is delicious binch (black-eyed beans) and yams from a streetside vendor in Bo, Sierra Leone). But our very first order of business is launching a new contest courtesy of AFAR, our favorite travel magazine (now available on both iPhone and Android) for its focus on real-deal experiential travel.

While we explored the...

We're stuck in Dakar's airport, waiting for our delayed flight to Freetown, and thought we'd use the opportunity to share the Q&A we recently did for journalist Cyrus Farivar's blog. The task proved harder than we'd thought: After a wasted $4 and half-hour of struggle with the French keyboards in the main lounge downstairs, we realized that our business-class seats--the last two seats available on this flight when we purchased them last week--entitled us to the "Prestige" lounge upstairs, where free wireless internet, food, and drinks await. Prestigious indeed!

So here we are in the lap of luxury, with A/C, cushy chairs, our iPad hooked up, and all the apples and peanuts, local...

After just three days, dusty Dakar has drawn us in with its street-corner baguettes, mellow fishing villages, surf-friendly beaches, and mad markets. A highlight among our explorations thus far has been the fish market at Soumbedioune, a cove on which the men's brightly painted pirogues, or canoes, are pulled from the water each evening, and the day's haul of seafood put out to sale. One side of the market is crowded by grill stations, manned by women cooking fresh fish over hot coals.

Between about 4pm and 6pm, the boats are lugged in, requiring a team of heaving men and two logs (or big empty metal canisters) to facilitate movement. The shore is crowded with onlookers,...

Tomorrow we leave for three weeks in Senegal and Sierra Leone.

The vaccines have been given, the bags (almost) packed, the subletter for our New York apartment is in place. We should already be there—we pushed back our trip partly to avoid Senegal’s protest-riddled presidential election on February 26, only to have it go into a runoff election happening smack-dab in the middle of our visit there (March 25). Hopefully we’ll be in the area during a positive historic moment, when peace and democracy win the day. According to friends in the area, that is what should happen.

In recent weeks we’ve been asked “why there?” a few times, either in the context of “how do you choose where you...

“I try to portray the colors of the Oaxacan landscape in the food I prepare: color, color, color! Oaxaca
is such a vibrant place, and having this reflected in the food you eat here makes Oaxacan cuisine even more enjoyable.”—Chef Pilar Cabrera,
La Olla 

Tell us about your job.
Currently I manage the kitchen of my restaurant La Olla, in Oaxaca, Mexico, and I am also the cooking instructor at Casa de los Sabores Cooking School.

What led you to become a chef?
I started cooking at an early age. My love for the smell, taste, color, and texture of food motivated me to go to university and get a degree in Food Engineering and Nutrition. After graduating I worked for Herdez-McCormick...

Street food: In the advent of the recent food-truck revolution, it’s been given a romantic connotation. But street food to us has always meant those dirt-cheap, true-blue local joints that you find while wandering a new city, the kind of places that make you immediately envious of the patrons and skeptical of the grub—a healthy suspicion that your gut instinct will either embrace or ignore. It might be termed the five stages of street food:

1. “Look at all the people chowing down on this corner! They are clearly enjoying that food.”
2. “Damn, does it smell good right here!”
3. “I wonder if this will make me sick.”
4. “Eh, it’ll be fine: big crowd, no flies, everything’s freshly...

Around the 15th of each month, we’ll select a new User and Food Memory of the Month. For the former, we’ll look for a user who contributes in both quantity and quality—that is, someone who’s uploaded at least eight regional food/drink photos with intelligent, entertaining descriptions…often the kind that make us want to get on a plane and go find that dish right now. For our Food Memory of the Month, we similarly will choose a story that we particularly loved, whether for being especially vivid, thoughtful, or funny.

Our newest User of the Month is Raluca, who has contributed 14 great photos and descriptions thus far, spanning the globe from her hometown of NYC to Sri Lanka (we...

We’d like to introduce a new recurring feature in Eat Your World: trip-recap videos! Every time we travel somewhere for EYW, we’ll create a one-minute video—compiled of photos and video footage we shoot on the road, edit, and set to music—to act as visual sum-up. And, no, it won’t be entirely about food: This is our opportunity to show you other sides of a destination, as well as a little bit of us.

Our first video is from North India, where we spent a few weeks last spring. It was challenging to stick to a minute for this one, to edit the hundreds of photos we took between the two of us in Delhi, Agra, and Udaipur. Ultimately we wanted to capture just a little of the frenetic pace,...

“I do what I love to do. I love to cook, I love to make folks happy with my food, I love to deepen my knowledge of cooking, I love going in to work. I love working the line.”
–Pat Martin, owner and pit master, Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint

Tell us about your job.
I’m a pit master. I’m at Martin’s almost every day. We’re open seven days a week. We have no freezers, we have no microwaves. We make everything on our menu from scratch every single day! We cook whole hog, brisket, shoulders, chicken, turkey, wings—we do it all.

What led you to your current position?
I grew up in a family of amazing Southern cooks—men and women! When I got to college at a tiny school named...

We are pleased to announce that Eat Your World was featured today in The New York Times’ Diner’s Journal blog.

What a great way to kick off 2012! The response has already been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and we’re thrilled our “ambitious,” “world-roaming” “work in progress” website about “regional foods that visitors shouldn’t miss” is getting such recognition just a few weeks out of the beta-mode gate. (Apologies to Zagat!)

Also glad we managed to post this smoked fish entry before too many New Yorkers came looking for it.

A few hours after the NYT piece, Lifehacker wrote about us, which really pushed our traffic through the roof—and then crashed us for about 20 minutes....

If you’re still hungry for North Indian food after our post on papri chaat and butter paneer masala, check out this post on Foodists.ca, in which we expound on our discovery of, and love for, chole bhature (curried chickpeas with fried bread). Recipe included, of course.

Related: Recipes From Afar: Papri Chaat & Butter Paneer Masala, North India

“Everyone we hire at ICOB spends time working on the farm so they can truly understand and speak to our culture.
They have a real connection to not only
the farm, but also to all of the people who work so hard growing and harvesting
the oysters.” –Skip Bennett, founder, Island Creek Oysters; co-owner, Island Creek Oyster Bar

What is your role at Island Creek Oyster Bar?
My role is largely one as a link to the farms, the farmers, and many of the seafood products.

What led you to your current job? 
Years ago, I heard about the Hog Island Oyster Bar out in San Francisco. After a trip there, I came back looking for a way to do something here in Boston. It seemed logical for the...

A half-year after returning home from a few weeks in North India, I thought it would be a good idea to cook some Indian dishes for friends. Twelve friends, to be exact.

It wasn’t long after I emailed said friends that I began questioning the wisdom of this decision.

Indian food is notoriously difficult for a non-Indian to pull off. Sure, having access to the right spices is half the battle, but in past experiments with an Indian cookbook, I’ve found that the spice ratio often seems off. For all the toasting and grinding of seeds called for, there’s never anywhere near the amount of flavor one expects, certainly nothing like the richness radiating from most Indian-restaurant dishes....

Have you met Eat Your World? Allow us to introduce ourselves in this one-minute video—and then scroll down the home page to see our newest content.

If you clicked through from the home page, see the column at left for the latest EYW Blog posts.

For those of you who came to know us during our beta phase, here’s the new stuff we launched in mid-December! Please let us know your feedback, including any bugs or issues you encounter, in the comment fields below.

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR

A Single Destinations Map: We’ve integrated the main EYW content map with the user maps, so we now have just one Destinations map. Not only is a single map more user-friendly than multiple...

In this new EYW Blog series, our writers will feature recipes of dishes they’ve encountered while away and re-created at home. 

A few gluttonous days in New Orleans are hard to beat, but while you can’t bring home the city’s soulful live music or lighthearted survivor spirit, you can at least attempt to make some of its classic foods in the daiquiri-free confines of your own kitchen. After my last trip to NOLA, I spent a week back in New York dreaming about beignets and BBQ shrimp before my husband and I got our acts together, invited some friends over, and set up a Sazerac bar. We were having a NOLA dinner party, damn it!

My mind wandered to what’s quick and delicious, and...

“Detroit, being the great melting pot that it is, will continue to shine in its diverse food offerings.” –Sy Ginsberg, co-owner, United Meat & Deli
 

Tell us about your job.
I oversee the processing of our products at United Meat & Deli; I handle the development of new products; I’m in charge of procuring raw materials and ingredients; and I handle much of our national sales.

Another one of my jobs is “deli consultant.” This is my favorite: Since I’ve been involved in the Jewish-style deli business for more than 50 years, I offer assistance to future [deli owners], helping them set up their deli, plan the menu, train, and generally get it off the ground. I do not charge for...

We often feel like we’re on a scavenger hunt when we travel for EYW. Sometimes we have just three days in a city to find all the foods we’ve researched, come up with good alternatives, entertain new ideas suggested by locals we meet, identify suitable “burn it off” locations. Despite the inevitable last-day dash around said city to tie up loose ends, we’ve become super efficient at these tasks. But doing it in, say, Boston and doing it in Agra, a garbage-strewn Indian city congested with all manner of human and animal traffic, are two very different things.

Last weekend, we arrived in Agra around 4:45pm after the 4.5-hour ride from Delhi, tired but hungry and eager to get started...

Our London EYW section—some 40-plus traditional foods and drinks in England’s fabulous capital—is under construction while we travel to India, but you can read about our absolute favorite Brit dining experience, at the new, historic-food-focused Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, over at Foodists.ca. (Pictured is the clever meat fruit, a dreamy, mousse-like chicken-liver parfait dipped in mandarin gelatin, inspired by the cheeky medieval English tradition of serving “illusion fruit” at dinner parties.) Stay tuned this summer for both London and New Delhi coverage!

Last weekend I finally attended one of Jeff Orlick’s (a.k.a. Jeffrey Tastes’s) Ambassador Program events, in which one person acts as expert of a cuisine (and, often, culture) and leads a meal for a small group in a NYC restaurant of their choice. Held at Tori Shin uptown and led by Japanese native Yasushi Sasaki, this event revolved around yakitori, or grilled chicken skewers—a more upscale take on the popular street snack than what I’d previously been exposed to along St. Marks Place, this time involving organic birds from Pennsylvania—and I hastened to participate, as Scott and I were feverishly researching our own trip to Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto next month. This was one day...

The New York City craft beer scene has exploded in recent years, but with a grand total of five breweries/brewpubs within city limits, we’re still a bit behind on the production front when compared to other U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Portland, Denver, and Austin, where it seems a new brewery opens every other week. (Fortunately, NYC fares better with craft beer bars.) But I have new hope for the future of New York beers after attending Brooklyn Wort, a biannual home-brew competition that packed 30 local brewers into the Gowanus Studio Space yesterday.

Scott and I were there primarily to support friends and event sponsors Valley Malt, a small Massachusetts-based start-up changing...

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a year since Scott and I first hatched the Eat Your World idea, while traveling around Colombia. Since then there’s been a lot of blood, sweat, and tears—and unexpected delays—but we’re proud to be where we are now. This week we soft-launched to a large group of friends and family, our public soft launch is just around the corner, and, with editorial food-and-drink coverage for 19 cities from 13 different states/provinces/countries, the site is really coming along. Slow and steady wins the race, right?

Of course, there’s much more on the way: We’ve done a lot of domestic traveling this year, and I’m still playing catch-up on the writing front....

Cranberries. I don’t think of them too often, unless I’m throwing a handful of dried ones into my salad. Or, you know, it’s this time of year, when cranberry sauce makes its annual appearance in the Thanksgiving spread. But cranberries are an important fruit to the U.S., not only because of their more recently publicized “superfruit” antioxidant qualities, but because they’re one of the few fruits that originated on North American soil. They were a staple in the diets of Native Americans, who passed along the wild fruit’s benefits to the Pilgrims when they arrived in the early 1600s. Cultivation of the berries began on Cape Cod in 1816; commercial harvesting followed in 1847. Today,...

It’s dangerous to write about food on an empty stomach.

This past week, as we scramble to get more content up on the site in anticipation of a soft launch, I find myself craving foods I ate last weekend or even several months ago: a fried whole Caribbean fish, a particular hot dog, a pasta dish. How can I not when rereading notes and calling to mind said hot dog’s crisp snap and tangy onion sauce? How can I possibly research the history of local NYC breweries and not want a cold beer? At 3pm, no less.

Today was the most torturous, though, as I revisited the buttery, cheesy, meaty egg pastas of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, the northern region considered by many to be Italy’s culinary...