About EYW

WHAT WE ARE

Launched in December 2011, Eat Your World is a guide to regional food and drinks around the globe founded on the principle that what you eat depends on where you are.

Our mission is to spotlight foods and drinks that are native or traditional to particular places around the world—and tell readers where to find them. Whether you’re in Bologna or Nashville, we believe that tasting the distinct foods and drinks of a destination is absolutely essential to experiencing it, as they illuminate that region’s unique culture, history, geography, and lore. Moreover, regional foods are your CULTURAL GATEWAY, the dishes and drinks that you get you deeper into a culture, leading to interactions with local people and incredible travel experiences (trust us).  In this context, “distinct foods” also includes those that are locally grown, sourced, or made, as local soils, waters, and climates are likewise inextricably linked to local foods, traditions, and the people consuming them. Our umbrella covers everything from “typical foods” to regional handcrafted beers.

We want to help fellow travelers find these truly authentic eats, but we’re also interested in culinary preservation, tracking down those more esoteric dishes that provide a glimpse of a city’s past life—our brief on-the-ground foray into food anthropology. Thus, Philadelphia isn’t just cheesesteaks; it’s also fried oysters with chicken salad, a popular 18th-century lunch in the city’s taverns. And escamoles, an Aztec delicacy, are just as important to Mexico City’s gastronomy as tacos al pastor.

By identifying and celebrating these unique local foods—which, in turn, celebrates and supports the local people, their cultural traditions, and their livelihoods—we hope to encourage others to seek them out for themselves.

Want to know more? See our FAQ below and our Press page.

WHAT WE DO

We tell readers what to eat in a given location. And though EYW revolves around food, not restaurants, we always state where to find the foods and drinks we feature. Street vendors, bakeries, holes-in-the-wall, high-end restaurants: EYW doesn’t discriminate if the food speaks to the place in which it’s found.

We also provide recommendations for how to burn it off because, despite what appears to be a penchant for BBQ, beignets, and empanadas, we are huge proponents of a healthy lifestyle that incorporates lots of physical activity (and eating those delicious things in moderation). Finally, we recommend where to stay—after all sleeping, like eating, is essential to any trip.

HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE

We invite all users to get involved in two ways:

  • By uploading photos of distinct regional foods and drinks around the world. We aim to create a truly global database, and we need your help to do so!
  • By writing short Food Memories to share online. We want to learn all about the world’s culinary traditions, and know that stories about food often convey the most sense of place.

Participation is free and on a volunteer basis. All photos and stories must be approved by EYW admin before it appears on the site.

WHO WE ARE

EYW is powered by the ambitious appetites of Laura Siciliano-Rosen and Scott Rosen, a travel-food writer and photographer (The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York, Men’s Journal) who have long counted eating new-to-them foods in new-to-them places—whether a faraway land or a restaurant down the street—among the greatest pleasures in life.

They live in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of NYC’s most diverse and delicious neighborhoods (where Laura runs guided food tours), with their two sons.

Eat Your World has been written up in The New York Times, Lifehacker, FATHOM, Money Magazine, and more! See more press here.

FAQ

We do a ton of pre-trip research, looking for a region’s typical foods and where we can find good representations of them. To generate ideas and create a list of foods and restaurants, we contact friends and family (and their friends) who live or hail from that region; we check out that area’s local food blogs and newspapers online; we ask local contacts on Twitter and Facebook; we skim through food forums like eGullet and Chowhound and sometimes regional guidebooks. However, we’re always willing to push the planning aside to pursue one really convincing recommendation from a perfect stranger in a local market, and inevitably we add to our list once we’ve arrived in a place and start noticing trends and talking to more people. It’s not a perfect science, and we’ll never claim to put forth an exhaustive list. In many cases, we hope to revisit regions and keep adding content in the future.

For us to identify a food as regional, it must meet one of the following criteria:

  1. It is native to that place, or concocted there.
  2. If not actually invented there, it is traditional to that place (i.e., historically eaten there, perhaps because the place was settled by immigrant group A two decades ago, or because a dish has long been served by a local institution so as to become a part of the area’s culinary landscape).
  3. It is locally grown, harvested, sourced, or crafted—what we call a locavore food/drink. For smaller cities, we will often feature one dish that highlights a bunch of locally sourced ingredients from a very locavore-centric restaurant. This allows us to showcase foods that are healthy, sustainable, and literally of that region’s earth. (For now we are not doing this for large cities in which the locavore options are too numerous to easily simplify this way.) This category also applies to area vineyards, breweries, and brewpubs.

A bit less scientifically put: When you think of City A, what foods/drinks do you (or should you) think of? And if you lived in City A, what would you tell visitors they had to eat while in town because it is so distinct to that area?

We look for places that are known to serve a good rendition of a particular dish. Note that we didn’t just say the “best” rendition! We’re not interested in objectifying something as inherently subjective as taste.

As mentioned earlier, however, we do also consider a restaurant by virtue of it being a local institution—one of those places that’s been around so long its food has become entwined with the city’s landscape. We think that makes its food distinct to that city, and onto our list it goes.

Please note that all of our research and selections are done independently. EYW never accepts payment of any kind from restaurants seeking to be highlighted on the site.

EYW doesn’t accept money or free meals from restaurants in exchange for coverage. All content is based upon independent travel, research, and good old-fashioned hitting-the-pavement.

We do work with advertisers (Mediavine platform), but all ads are featured in obvious positions. Any paid/sponsored content elsewhere on the site will be clearly labeled as such. Interested parties should contact sales@eatyourworld.com.

No, we don’t. We shine the spotlight on certain foods and drinks, then tell you where you can find them.

Although it is impossible to guarantee the complete accuracy of every detail on this website at every moment—menus change, restaurants close, prices rise—we do try to fact-check regularly so that our information stays relevant, and we constantly edit entries as needed to reflect any changes we become aware of. If you notice something that is inaccurate, please leave us a comment or contact us directly so that we may look into it.

Wherever you see the EYW snapshot symbol, we’re alerting you to brief—but still valuable—EYW information about that location. Usually we are highlighting two to five exceptional regional foods without going into full coverage, because we need to revisit the area to do that.

Yes. Email licensing questions, including for use on blogs, to sales@eatyourworld.com. Check out our terms of use for more information.

New York-based graphic designer Raluca Preda created the EYW logo.

Pretty nice things! Check out our Press page for details.