Houston is America’s most diverse city, and—in not unrelated news—it’s increasingly touted as one of the country’s best cities for food. And yet it still flies under the radar for many people. Perhaps the city sprawl frightens them away, or the prospect of having to drive (a minimum of) 20 minutes to get pretty much anywhere. But that’s a small price to pay to experience some of the best this dynamic city has to offer.

In Houston, not only does the great diversity make for lots of variety in the restaurant scene, but the city’s special brand of colliding cultures has also created a perfect storm of culinary innovation, of unapologetic riffing on local tradition, that’s...

Bilad Sayt, an Arabian village near Jebel Shams in Oman. Courtesy of mzagerp/Flickr.

Oman is a land of cultural diversity, rich history, and abundant natural beauty. From the capital city of Muscat and well beyond, the country has always been an underrated and unexplored part of Arabia. So why isn't it at the top of travelers’ bucket lists? From its 3,000-kilometer-long coastline and the highest mountain peak on the Arabian Peninsula to its culinary excellence dating back centuries, Oman is an epitome of adventure, heritage—and delicious food, lots of which reflect foreign influence absorbed from the country’s long-held role as a powerful trading empire in Arabia.

So let’s...

In Sweden, the ability to forage for food is practically enshrined in law under allemansrätten, the Swedes' unique right of public access. Here's how visitors to Stockholm can experience Swedish foraging culture for themselves.


Stockholm photo courtesy of Pedro Szekely/Flickr

Imagine it: You’re out in the woods; it’s quiet and peaceful. Moss softens your footsteps and a quaint wicker basket hangs from your elbow. You’ve found a beautiful patch of whatever you were looking for—maybe it’s blueberries, mushrooms, or even the coveted cloudberry, and you’re free to take it home with you. 

Foraging is a regular part of life for many Swedes, even those in urban centers. This...

If you've seen the movie Coco, you might guess that El Día de los Muertos is a wonderful, life-affirming time to visit Mexico, expecially if you can find a local family to take you under their wing.

I wrote this piece, about spontaneously spending the Day of the Dead with a local named Rafael and his family in Oaxaca, several years ago. It is based on an experience from 2004, when we spent six weeks backpacking around Mexico. Six years later, we returned to Oaxaca to study its cuisine and found Rafael, having saved his business card (see at bottom). Lots of hugs and mezcal were shared all around.
 

From my seat on a wooden bench outside the corner store, I took in the busy...

Traveling to Cambodia as a vegetarian? Here's your (updated) guide to eating well.


Banana vendor in Kampong Chhnang province, Cambodia. Photos by Glynn Pogue

As I slurped up the last bit of spicy broth from my lunch of ramen noodle and bok choy, I felt full and satisfied. That is, until I took a final look at my bowl: Hiding at the bottom, alongside a few stray bean sprouts, was an indiscernible hunk of fatty flesh on bone. Chicken? Beef? Pork? My contentment quickly dissipated. What on Earth did I just eat?

Does this sound familiar, fellow traveling vegetarians? I'd recently gotten to Cambodia (as part of the Peace Corps), and I was still figuring out how to navigate being a...

A local chef tells us the best things to eat on the street in the Jordanian capital.


Amman, Jordan. Photo courtesy of Ronald Woan/Flickr.

In the Middle East, the history of street food goes back a long way. There are stories of people in Cairo bringing their own pieces of rawhide upon which to have makeshift picnics, after buying their lunch from street sellers. In 1502, Ottoman Turkey was apparently the first place to regulate the sale of street foods. Amman, Jordan, is no exception to the street food obsession: Like billions of people worldwide, the population of this city consumes food from street vendors every single day.

I grew up in Amman at a time when it was a small...

From elk meatloaf and huckleberry pie to rainbow trout and bison burgers, here’s where to eat great food—and fuel up for a hike—just outside Glacier NP, Montana.


Bison graze in East Glacier. Photos courtesy of Amy Grisak except where noted.

Visiting the stunningly beautiful Glacier National Park, in northwest Montana’s Rocky Mountains, doesn’t have to mean settling for a generic dining experience that exists only to fill tourists’ stomachs. Just beyond the park there are culinary gems, many of them open only June through September, that let you experience the true flavor and feel of Montana. The secret, of course, is getting off the beaten path and finding those locally owned...

Ewa agoyin, courtesy of Kake/Flickr

Life in Lagos would be incomplete without street food. Most Lagosians have a penchant for it: while commuting to work, at lunchtime or as a means of relaxation after a day’s work. Street food in Lagos is serious business, and it is everywhere, providing livelihood for thousands of people from every part of the nation and even for those from outside Nigeria. While there are a lot of manufactured snacks sold to commuters, fresh-cooked street foods hold a special place in the heart of Lagosians: Some, such as akara, are loved for being served hot and fresh (and delicious), while others, such as okpa, are cherished for their traditional taste and...

Pub snacks, main dishes, sweets: Look for these 10 classic Czech dishes to eat like a born-and-raised local in Prague.


Letenské sady (Letná Park) in Prague.

It’s a city that’s the “heart of Europe” and the “city of a hundred spires,” a romantic legend dripping with history and beauty. No one talks about the food in Prague though (beer, yes, but not food). Czech cuisine is, understandably so, categorized as greasy and heavy, for carnivores only. The dishes themselves weren’t so bad as the quality (and scope) of ingredients used, and the fact that under Communist rule, culinary innovation was all but squashed. Now things are different in Prague.

Not only are there imported...

Updated to reflect the Trump administration's newest (June 2019) attempt to keep Americans out of Cuba: You can't go there on a cruise ship, but as an American you can still legally travel solo to Cuba—and help support the Cuban people. It’s not nearly as hard (or illegal) to get there as the U.S. government would like you to think. Here’s how to do it.

Centro Habana

It seems with every U.S. administration there are new rules about Cuba. Can Americans go or not? Independently or group only? Is tourism still banned? (Yes, it is.)

It wasn’t until 2016 that it became clear that former President Obama was actually relaxing the rules, and independent travel by Americans to Cuba...

Kenya is known for its welcoming spirit, its athletic champions, beautiful scenery, and majestic wildlife. But it’s about time it’s also more known for its excellent food. Nairobi, the capital, is the best place to embark upon an incredible Kenyan food adventure. The city that never sleeps is also where you’ll find some of the most delicious dishes south of the Sahara.

If you really want to experience authentic Kenyan cuisine passed down through many generations, you’re in the right spot. Here’s what to eat in Nairobi today and where to find it. 

Maize ugali, courtesy of Paresh Jai/Flickr

Ugali
Ugali is the main staple food of Kenya, prepared by mixing maize flour with...

Churchill Downs. Photo by Scott B. Rosen

It’s that time of year again in Louisville—when the big hats and big bucks come out to play at Churchill Downs for the annual Kentucky Derby horse-racing event. There will be drama, there will be betting, and you can rest assured there will be bourbon, but whether you’re there to witness “the Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports” or just to soak up the hoopla around the ongoing Derby Festival, there’s one thing you don’t have to gamble with: delicious local food.

From the city’s signature hot brown and a hip country-ham “bar” to Mind of a Chef star Edward Lee’s three excellent restaurants—not to mention the requisite drive out in the...

Our favorite tips, recipes, and products for a more sustainable plate and kitchen, including eating less meat and cutting back on plastic bags.



This month, we dedicated our monthly newsletter and social media coverage to Earth Day, which falls on Monday, April 22, in the U.S. Every year we try to organize a street cleanup with our kids and their friends in our Queens neighborhood, which feels great and instructive and symbolic, but let's be honest: We kind of need to be doing that daily. We need to think of what we can do ALL THE TIME to really make an impact, and I'm limiting this here to easy individual actions that are not politically or policy-related (that is essential too,...

A tlayuda from Doña Favia in Oaxaca, Mexico. All photos courtesy of Catherine Tansey.

Few foods are more Oaxaqueño than the crisp, chewy tlayuda. Affectionately called “Mexican pizza,” tlayudas are large crispy tortillas, warmed on a comal and brushed with smoky asiento (pork lard). Toppings vary but usually include a smear of velvety black beans, shredded lettuce, and some type of salty meat like tasajo or cecina; the best are loaded with the famed chewy, stringy quesillo of the region.

But in my first few weeks in Oaxaca, I quickly saw that not all tlayudas are created equal. Several disappointed me, being either too crisp, too chewy, or too bland. I knew there had to be...

In the past decade, Wynwood has transformed from industrial garment-district ’hood filled with warehouses and auto shops to an incredibly coveted, trendy, must-visit part of Miami—not only for its jaw-dropping large-scale street art, but also for its exploding food and drink scene. There’s so much crammed into the few lively blocks around the famed Wynwood Walls that you barely need to leave a four-block radius to experience some of the best restaurants, bars, and of course art that the area has to offer, making an afternoon trip highly doable for the time-pressed. Here are some of our favorite highlights from our recent visit to the Wynwood Arts District, including restaurants and...

In honor of our ongoing month of Caribbean food on social media, we have a recipe from the Bahamas for pigeon peas and rice, provided by our friends at The Foreign Fork. A staple of Bahamian cuisine, this dish is typically seasoned with tomatoes and tomato paste, onions, thyme or oregano, and often salted pork or bacon (vegetarians, beware!). Check out the recipe below, and see our guide to Bahamian foods.


Courtesy of The Foreign Fork

Bacon fries in one pan and then cooks alongside rice and peas to make this scrumptious main or side dish. A one-pan wonder and 40 minutes from start to finish, this dish is fantastic for a quick dinner after work!

Pigeon peas have been a staple...

Courtesy of ©Rajesh Pamnani 2018

It may be the financial capital of India and the home of Bollywood, but Mumbai is also a true food lover’s paradise. And if you love street food, you’re especially in luck, as every corner has a stall with a few quintessential Bombay dishes—foods that are part of the daily meal routine for most in the city. From the traditional Marathi breakfast with Mumbai’s ladi pav (fluffy white buns) to the tangy import of South Indian sambhar, there’s something to suit every taste bud here. Many of these dishes are vegetarian, and all are prepared from scratch—sometimes before your very eyes—without any processed chemicals or additives, so you can feel good...

In honor of our month of Caribbean food on social media, we have a recipe for ducana, one of our favorite Antiguan dishes, provided by our friends at The Foreign Fork. Ducana is a dumpling made of grated sweet potato, coconut, cinnamon, and other seasonings that’s wrapped in a banana leaf, boiled in water, and served as a common side to fish dishes. Check out the recipe below, and then see our full guide to Antiguan foods.
 

Photos courtesy of The Foreign Fork except where indicated.
 

Making Antiguan ducana was such a fun experience because it was unlike anything I had ever done before. First you grate sweet potatoes and combine them with sugar, coconut, flour, and spices....

Larb tofu, pomelo salad, corn fritters and more: Here’s how (and where) to eat vegetarian and vegan—and hold the fish sauce—in Bangkok, Thailand.


Pad see ew. All photos courtesy of Kelly Iverson.

Calling all adventurous, meat-free diners: This guide is for you. Thailand may be best known for its dreamy beaches and abundance of temples, but it's also, of course, every food-lover’s dream for its inherent knack with spice and gorgeous nuanced flavors. And, happily enough, this does not exclude vegans and vegetarians!

However, as with any foreign place, it is not always easy or immediately apparent what is truly veg-friendly. If you are eating vegetarian in Thailand, there are...

Sixteen unexpected gifts for the travelers and eaters in your life.

Snares to Wares' elephant sculpture

If you’re anything like us, you are doing your best to not wait until December 23 to buy or order all your gifts. Maybe, just maybe, this year will be different! To help you in that goal, we’ve assembled a personal, eclectic collection of gift ideas for people who love to eat, travel, and cook; people who have kids and like fashion and want to do something good for the world. If you’re anything like us, that sounds like a LOT of people in your life, so go get shopping!

For the home cook


 

Bamboo steamer
Here’s an easy way to incorporate more healthy steamed...

Where to eat in Times Square that's not a tourist trap? Start with these 26 local-approved places.



Everyone will tell you: Don’t eat in Times Square; it’s all touristy overpriced nonsense. And there is some of that, sure. But there are also plenty of spots that are not that—at least 26 of them, by our count. And you really ought to know about them.

Although New Yorkers may say they don’t eat in Times Square, inevitably they do—lots of us work in or around the area, or attend the occasional Broadway show or other event that requires a trip here. And a visitor to NYC really can’t escape it. Nor should they—everyone coming to New York has to see Times Square!

Thankfully, it’s...

Photos courtesy of Experience Jackson

Michigan’s food scene isn’t all about Detroit. In this sponsored post, meet Jackson County, birthplace of the beloved Coney dog and so much more.

Jackson County, Michigan, is known for its diner-style pit stops and family-owned eateries. Whether you are looking for a place to dine in or take out from, eat a regional specialty or devour BBQ, enjoy doughnuts or chow down on desserts, Jackson County’s food scene puts its focus on genuine personality, atmosphere, and taste.

So, what makes Jackson County’s approach to food stand out?

Historically operated eateries are around every corner. Many of them have been serving the community for...

This guide comes courtesy of INSIDR, a friendly travel startup born in Paris in 2015. The goal of INSIDR is simple but ambitious: to help foreign travelers prepare their trip to Europe with qualitative content, recommendations, and innovative new services, like the INSIDR smartphone: a fully connected phone you rent while traveling, complete with maps and access to local experts! Welcome to Europe with INSIDR. (See Insidr's Paris recs in this earlier post.)

Ed.’s note: This post contains affiliate links. Should you buy an INSIDR service, we’ll receive a small commission—but we know you’ll love it! Thank you.



London

London’s dining scene has been completely reborn in...

Because if you like to “eat your world,” you’ll definitely want to “eat everywhere.”

Try this delicous “Ice-Breaker” dish—kaeng som, or sour curry—the next time you get Thai food.

Guys, it’s time for some real talk. We don’t know how to put this, but there’s something we gotta get off our chests: We don’t always know what to order at a restaurant.

I know, I know. We’ve dedicated the better part of the past two decades to eating around the world, studying cuisines, visiting countless restaurants in New York City, where you can find almost anything. But there are so many cuisines (and regional cuisines within them), and so little time! Particularly if it's food from a place we...

Steamed shrimp. All photos by Kathleen Walls

Wherever you find sun and sand, there will be good seafood. Beloved summertime destination Outer Banks, barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina, has all three and more. Here’s where to find the good stuff.

Oyster counter at Coastal Provisions

Oysters

Coastal Provisions Oyster Bar & Wine Bar Café in Southern Shores is the perfect place for lunch after visiting the Wright Brothers National Memorial. The restaurant, market, and retail store hybrid is the brainchild of Dan Lewis and Scott Foster, both world-class chefs. The specialty here is oysters. While there are more than 20 varieties of raw oysters on offer—including...

Planning a trip to New York City is hard enough, but if you really care about food? Weeding through countless blog posts, guidebooks, newspaper and magazine articles, Yelp reviews, Instagram posts and everything else on the internet, you’ll be in information overload before you know it. The fact of the matter is there’s an insane quantity of restaurants in NYC. And it IS possible to not eat well.

It’s easy to end up in tourist-driven restaurants, with large bills and subpar food.

It’s easy to run yourself ragged trying to cover all the top spots.

It’s easy to get lost, or miss a great eating opportunity right around the corner from that attraction you’re at.

Traveling with...

Photo courtesy of Jason Pappas

Ocean City’s largely underrated food scene encompasses a slew of local family-owned food joints, many of which have been around for decades. Dining options cater to just about every budget and include quick boardwalk eats, waterfront fine dining, and just about everything in between.

To help you make the most of your next trip, here’s our list of eight must-try food and drink experiences in Ocean City, Maryland—from steamed crab feasts to iconic cocktails and candy apples. 

Photo courtesy of the Original Greene Turtle

Crab Fries at the Original Greene Turtle
Let’s face it: A trip to Maryland isn’t complete without tasting the world-famous...

Disclosure: Bokksu sent us a sample box free of charge. All opinions are honest and our own (also: unpaid).

A new culinary subscription box (there are so many now!) was recently brought to our attention: Bokksu, a monthly curated selection of gourmet snacks from Japan built around a seasonal theme. Already fans of gourmet Japanese confectionery Minamoto Kitchoan in NYC—not to mention frequent buyers of Japanese-style rice crackers from our local Asian grocery store—we couldn’t wait to try this one.

The “Blossoming Spring” box we received had a strong cherry blossom, or sakura, theme—not a surprise given it was April, that wondrous time of year when Japanese cherry trees the...

Courtesy of Lew Childre

“Forget the imported shrimp and foreign fish; now it’s all about fresh, local, sustainable and even weird.”—Lew Childre, Alabama oyster farmer, Shellbank Selects

For years, Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, Alabama, were secret havens for fresh seafood and beautiful beaches that only the locals frequented. But as the South’s population grew, this beach location became a getaway for families from all over.

Restaurants are plentiful in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, and many specialize in oysters. While many visitors enjoy dining on them, few are likely aware how much they benefit the waters. Statistics say that one oyster filters 50 gallons of water each day....

A potato and pea curry from Pakistan. All photos courtesy of Clara Wiggins.

It was the summer of 2008, and we had just moved to Islamabad, caught in an intense heat that trapped us indoors, where the air-conditioning made life bearable. I had a toddler and a baby, my husband was at work all day, and most of the other families on the compound of the British High Commission where we lived were away for the holidays. Until our container of goods turned up, we didn’t even have more than a handful of toys.

Into this miserable situation came Ansa—like a savior in her beautiful flowing shalwar kameeze, helping me with child care, taking on the cleaning, being someone for me to talk to,...

What to eat in Colombo, Sri Lanka? Start these 10 local dishes.


All photos courtesy of Zinara Rathnayake.

Although there are a few similarities to neighboring India, Sri Lanka’s cuisine is all its own: diverse, very spicy, and flavor-packed. Thanks to a growing expat community, the food scene in the capital, Colombo, is thriving more than ever, with tons of restaurants and cafes serving many international and fusion cuisines. But thankfully, from upscale restaurants to hole-in-the-wall eateries, Colombo still caters to those who are looking for real-deal Sri Lankan food. Here are some of the delicious dishes you just gotta try in Sri Lanka, and where to find them in Colombo.
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Photos courtesy Neha Khullar

Neha Khullar's new cookbook, Palate Passport, has a mission we can relate to: “Travel the world using food as a compass.” We asked her a few questions about how the book came to be.
 

Please tell us a little about your background as a writer, traveler and cook.
Traveling is something that I’ve had the privilege to do since I was a child. I come from a globally spread-out family, which meant we traveled to see each other! Each phase of my life has consisted of travel and a love for eating local food. I’ve consistently returned from trips with a desire to cook that food once I was back home. Writing and telling stories came to me in my 20s when I...

All photos courtesy of Javier Ornelas, except where indicated.

“Bubbles eventually pop, and we, as a community, have to figure out how to sustain a middle class while maintaining Tulum as a vibrant tourist destination.”—Javier Ornelas, of Hotel Ginger in Tulum

Mexico’s food culture is increasingly global.

As the influx of immigrants from all over the world continues to swell, notions about what is “authentic” Mexican food evolve beyond the “tacos and tequila” stereotype.

This is especially true of Tulum, an idyllic, tropical paradise bordered by lush jungle and the Caribbean Sea. Here, you are just as likely to find a German bakery, Italian and Thai restaurants, and Japanese...

Seafood platter at the Salt Room (courtesy of the Salt Room)

A mere 47-minute train ride from London, Brighton, on the south coast of England, combines traditional seaside fun with an artistic, free-thinking vibe. Its proximity to the capital makes it a popular destination for day-trippers escaping the Big Smoke, but the offbeat city is worthy of more than one day of exploration for those who can swing it.

Brighton’s quirkiness is reflected in its food scene, too: From funky cafes to innovative fine dining restaurants, the city has more eateries per head than anywhere else outside the capital. Here’s a taste of what Brighton has to offer:
 

Spread at the Chilli Pickle...

A recipe for Romania's most essential, homiest, heartiest dish, straight out of the countryside: mamaliga.


All photos by Alex Chirita

My boyfriend and I had just arrived in Băcani, a small rural village in northeast Romania, about five hours from Bucharest by train. Before we could even hang up our coats and put down our bags, a pot of bright yellow mamaliga was being stirred in the kitchen. It was well after 10 p.m., but there was no question we’d be having a home-cooked Romanian meal before heading to bed.

And I’m so happy we did.

Made of corn flour, water, and salt, polenta-like mamaliga is as common as bread in Romania. In fact, it used to be known as “poor man’s...

Spam fried rice, Hawaiian meatballs, coconut chicken, pani popo—we’ve got you covered with recipes fit for Moana. Or just your next Polynesian party.

Recently we agreed to host a Moana viewing party for some friends in our building, ranging in age from 1.5 to early 50s. Providing the couch and the TV was easy enough, and tropical cocktails seemed essential, but what where we going to eat? The answer, of course, was Polynesian food. And what was that, exactly?

In the film, Moana and her people are presented as generic Polynesian, displaying traits from several cultures in that part of the world: Hawaiian, Samoan, Maori, Tahitian, Fijian, and more. The story incorporates...

The final piece of a three-part series brought to you by Tibet Vista, a tour agency specializing in Tibet travel since 1984 (see parts one and two here).


All photos courtesy of Tibet Vista

For people who love food, one of the main reasons for choosing a Tibet tour is the culinary culture there. We’ve covered the basics of Tibetan cuisine already; now we’ll go into the dishes you can expect to eat at restaurants in Tibet. Thanks to the close geographical proximity, Tibetan food reflects influences of Indian, Chinese, and Nepalese cookery in its main dishes. However, partly due to the high altitude of the region, rice is not easily cultivated in Tibet, and therefore is not,...

Part two of a three-part series brought to you by Tibet Vista, a tour agency specializing in Tibet travel since 1984 (see part one here): Meet a Tibetan tour guide.

All photos courtesy of Tibet Vista

“This job can help others learn about Tibet and make my life significant.” —Sonam Tenphel, Tibet tour guide

A group tour is only as great as the person leading it, so you want an experienced guide with both the knowledge and the passion to see it through. Enter Sonam Tenphel of Tibet Travel agency, a Tibetan native with a background in art history and a penchant for vegetable momos who considers Lhasa “the most beautiful, intriguing city in the world”—and shows it off to his...

It’s a famously overexploited, not quite endangered, species. But when conch is on every menu in town, there’s got to be a ton of ’em, right? A look at that beloved Caribbean mollusk, the queen conch—and how to help protect it.


Shell vendor on Potter's Cay, Nassau

“Are you feeling conchy tonight?” the waitress inquired with a smile when we wondered aloud about the Bimini conch linguine—a $22 Bahamian take on the traditional Italian clam dish, apparently. We were at a sports bar outside Nassau with friends and our collective flock of young kids, and we’d already had conch fritters and a conch patty earlier that day. The general consensus: Aren’t we always feeling conchy down...

Scott and I have called various parts of NYC home for 15-plus years now, which, besides dating us considerably, means we've eaten quite a lot in this fair town of ours. It was here, after all, where my own love for food, and for experiencing foods from far-flung cultures, blossomed to the point of obsession, and where we've moved whole neighborhoods, boroughs even, largely to surround ourselves with more interesting, authentic global eats. Within this article, I’ve detailed much of what I’d send to any friend/acquaintance/reader who writes me asking what and where to eat while in New York (of course, I always send along EYW’s NYC regional-food guide, too). Happy eating!

*Updated for...

Want to eat local in Dubai? Even in such a multicultural city, it doesn't have to be difficult. Don't miss these traditional Dubai foods on your next visit.  

Dubai as seen from the towering Burj Khalifa. Photo by Tom Olliver/Flickr.

Dubai is home to thousands of immigrants, and as such, is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. The city’s multiculturalism is highly evident in its local food scene, an impressive smorgasbord of international cuisine. You’ll find the best Lebanese restaurants in Dubai as well as Japanese, American, Indian, Italian, French, Chinese, Philippine and many more.

But even with the abundance of international fare, you still need to...

Tibetan food is dear to our hearts—we’ve made our home in a NYC neighborhood with a large Tibetan population—so we’re pleased to work with Tibet Vista, a tour agency specializing in Tibet travel since 1984, to bring you a series of three articles on Tibetan food and travel. (See also parts two and three.)
 

All photos courtesy of Tibet Vista

The high-altitude environment of Tibet has shaped not only Tibetans’ lifestyle and culture, but also the food and drinks they consume. With an average altitude of more than 4,000 meters, food and drink must be high in energy content, and be able to sustain the rigorous lifestyle of the Tibetan people. Not only does this high altitude...

An eclectic little guide to help with those last few gifts you need to buy.


The Palomar PinWorld map: a family favorite.

We at Eat Your World are notoriously last-minute holiday-gift buyers, but we’ve learned a lesson over the years: It’s never too late, especially when the perfect gift is only a click away. Our first-ever gift guide is a bit eclectic: Some of these items we own and love (or have given as gifts ourselves), some we want to own (hint, hint), and others are just random cool things on our radar. If you’re stuck on that one person you never know what to buy, we're here to help.

FOR THE TRAVELING EATER

Roadfood
Yes, it’s old-school, and, yes, much of...

Capitone, or eel, from Lazio

From north Italy to south (more or less), our writer takes a look at those most traditional and distinctly regional of Italian dishes: the ones trotted out for Christmas.
 

Nothing is more Italian than its culturally significant foods. And there is no time in the year when culinary traditions are more alive than during the Christmas season, when every table is royally laden with the most typical foods. During the rest of the year all the characteristics that define our extremely different regional dishes are not as evident as they used to be—people now tend to eat lighter and more generic foods—but at Christmas the grandmas want to have fun and...

Roti canai + chicken leg for breakfast. All photos courtesy of Food and Footprints.

In this guest post, the duo behind Food and Footprints—fellow Queens-based eaters and travelers—share some favorite local finds from a spontaneous trip to Penang, Malaysia (never mind that they thought they were going to Cuba!).

In Malaysia, Pulau Pinang, or Penang Island, is acclaimed for its diversity and high quality of food—a fact apparent when you’re strolling through the UNESCO World Heritage city of George Town, the island’s capital (and the country’s second-largest city, behind Kuala Lumpur). Within a short stretch, there are beautiful Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Catholic places of...

In preparation for the holiday travel season, we are sharing a few of our hard-earned tips for traveling with that most delightful of age brackets: babies and toddlers.

OK, parents of little ones: We’ve all been there. You arrive to your Airbnb and realize you forgot to ask about a high chair. Your 2-year-old decides to wake up at 5am every day on your trip and the hotel doesn’t serve breakfast until 8am. The iPad runs out of power midway through the flight and WHAT ARE THE KIDS GOING TO DO NOW?

It isn’t always a blast, but traveling with little kids is infinitely easier and more enjoyable if you come well stocked and well prepared—physically and mentally. We’ve already covered...

The best mushrooms you will ever eat, from Bar Ganbara in San Sebastian

Basque pintxos (“peen-shos”) are little culinary treats, generally either bite-size morsels or small plates of food. They are found all across Spanish Basque Country, proudly displayed on the tops of bars or made to order. To us, they always seem like tapas times 10: more artful, more delicious, more fun to eat. They generally cost about one to three euros each, and can comprise any number of things, making good use of the region’s abundant local produce, meats, and fresh seafood—from the super simple (pulpo, perfectly sautéed) to the superbly innovative (anchovy-derived sorbet). Most common are the towering...

Disclosure: Amarula sent us an at-home safari “care package” in return for helping to raise awareness of the company’s latest elephant-saving initiative. We think this is a great cause.

Like Baileys? Kerrygold Irish cream? Here’s one for you to try: Amarula. The traditional South African cream liqueur, made from the fruit of the wild marula tree—which grows only in subequatorial Africa—is velvety and rich, a little butterscotchy and sweet from the hand-picked, fermented fruit. As the temperature (finally) starts to drop here in New York, Amarula on the rocks is becoming our new favorite after-dinner drink—a deliciously creamy finish to the evening. But there’s a nobler...

Your essential list of what to eat in Riga, Latvia.


Bryan Ledgard/Flickr

The tiny Baltic country sandwiched between Scandinavia and Central Europe is a fusion of beautiful architecture, a buzzing arts scene, and food like no other. Food is what makes the world go round in Latvia. Any Latvian will tell you that they’ve forged a special connection with nature, and it is reflected in their food. They grow, hunt, fish, forage, pickle, smoke, and preserve anything they can get their hands on.

Influenced by centuries of foreign powers and Nordic, Germanic, and Slavic ingredients and techniques, Latvian food always surprises with its inventive flavors and modern takes on traditional...

The Wisconsin State Capitol building in Madison

We’re always happy to visit Madison, Wisconsin. One of us went to school there; the other once wrote a guide to biking and beer-tasting in the state capital. We both had a lot of fun.

On a recent whirlwind weekend trip, we didn’t have a ton of time to explore, but did get to revisit some favorite regional foods and taste some new ones. Here’s our weekend cheat sheet to delicious local eating in Madison.

Fresh cheese curds from the Dane County Farmers Market

Fresh cheese curds + local cheese

If you’re not from around here (or a similarly dairy-minded state), you may not even know what cheese curds are. They are simply little...

A spread from Dishoom. Photo courtesy of Yasmin Fahr/LokaPack

In this guest post, our friends at LokaPack, an expert-curated food and travel guide, spill the beans on where to score the best Indian food in London.

“The only good places to eat in London are curry houses”: You would have heard many people say this back in the day (curry houses are how Brits loosely refer to Indian restaurants). That’s a saying of the past, as London’s food scene is way underrated and has seen a tremendous amount of positive growth, particularly from chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi, Jason Atherton, and Nuno Mendes, but the fact that it’s the best place to eat Indian food outside of India itself...

According to our contributor, if views and vistas were edible, you’d never go hungry in Iceland. Photos won’t fill your belly, of course, so thankfully there’s a ton of hearty things to munch on.

Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon. All photos courtesy of Chanie Hyde.

Traditional Icelandic meals that you may have heard of, like sheep’s face and various uses of offal, are getting harder to come by as younger generations make a decent income and have grown their palates to more European tastes. Subsistence farming to survive the cold of winter and eating what’s available while preserving the rest are no longer necessary. “Back in my day!” cry the baby boomers of Iceland, lamenting the...

Our friends at Uniplaces, a student accommodation provider, share our belief that regional foods are key to unlocking a new culture when you travel. And they made these adorable maps to prove it.

Despite its small size, Portugal displays a great food variety. Known specially for its high-quality grilled fish and seafood, the country also has great meat options if you head to the countryside, like leitão à Bairrada (roasted suckling pig) or carne de porco à Alentejana (pork with clams). Ah, and you shouldn’t miss the regional specialty from the two largest cities in the country, pastéis de nata (egg custard tart) in Lisbon and francesinha (an open-faced sandwich with sauce,...

What on earth is a datil pepper and why is it found only in St. Augustine, Florida? Our writer fills us in.

Courtesy of St. Augustine, Ponte Vedra & the Beaches Visitors & Convention Bureau

St. Augustine, in northeastern Florida, has a short-and-sweet secret: the datil pepper. Never heard of it? You’re not alone, nor are you to blame: Though the datil has been a part of this region’s agriculture and local cuisine for centuries, it is rarely found outside St. Augustine. It’s a small hot yellow-orange pepper that falls between 100,000 and 300,000 on the Scoville scale, ranking it with habaneros, but unlike those peppers’ four-alarm scorch, the burn of the datil is short, and then...

In this special guest post, we hear from Laurie Vaquer, founder of soon-to-be-launched Take Me Cooking, a platform that will enable local cooks to share their cooking with travelers around the world. Her inspiration comes from a particularly special trip to Zanzibar. (Bonus: She shares some of her favorite Zanzibari recipes.)

Ingredients for a Zanzibari feast. All photos by Laurie Vaquer.

In the past few years, I’ve gone to Zanzibar three times, and I’d return in a heartbeat. My second visit was in December 2015; I was staying with friends in the capital city, Stone Town. As I wandered the narrow streets and admired some beautiful typical Zanzibari wooden doors, I thought of...

A Mendoza vineyard. All photos by Sara Helmark

The gorgeous scenery, the endless vineyards, the hefty meat and sweet pastries—Mendoza, Argentina, has much to offer the culinary traveler. In this bustling city with a laid-back vibe, it’s easy to visit for two days and wind up staying a month. The only downside? You might, like me, put on a few kilos while eating your way around this city. Trust me, it’s worth it. Here's what to eat and drink in Mendoza.

Wine & Wineries

Home to beloved Malbec, Mendoza is, of course, one of the biggest wine districts of the world. Just on the outskirts of town, Luján de Cuyo is ground zero for Malbec production; the area became a gold mine...

A quick recipe for burek, aka pita, from a cooking class in the mountains of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

All photos by Gigi Griffis

Ask anyone who has been to Bosnia and Herzegovina—the lush, mountainous Balkan country where Europe’s most recent war was waged just 20 years ago—about the food and you’ll get the same answers every time.

They’ll tell you about pita bread stuffed with cevapi, the local minced-meat sausage made from lamb, pork, or beef. They’ll tell you about ajvar—thick, tart red pepper sauce served with pretty much every meat dish in the country. And, undoubtedly, they’ll tell you about burek, the king of Bosnian dishes: an extremely thin pastry filled with meat and...

Wine tasting in Niagara-on-the-Lake

The rolling hills of Napa Valley, the elegant vineyards of France and Italy, the rows of vines in coastal New Zealand—that’s where great wine comes from, right? Well, yes, but you might be surprised to discover that Canada also belongs on that list.

Better known for grub like poutine and maple syrup and sports like hockey, Canada isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you consider world-class wineries to visit. However, it’s home to some exceptional vineyards that have been flying under the radar for years. The cool microclimate of Ontario and other regions of Canada, like the Okanagan Valley and Nova Scotia, are perfect for creating the...

Our writer details how to make healthy, delicious congee two ways: one traditional, one modern.

"American Girl Porridge," courtesy of Kimberly Nichols

My obsession with Asian porridges started years ago, when I found the cheaply made and nutritious bowl of ancient Chinese food called congee listed as one of the most nutritious foods in the world, according to my global herbalism textbook. It was noted that many a spry monk in the Himalayas considered three plain bowls of soupy rice a day the key to vibrant health and longevity. To that end, my herbal course suggested mixing up the plain, lovingly long-cooked rice and water recipe with a myriad of fun additions like herbs,...

Our writer learns how to make cabrito, or roasted baby goat, from a Monterrey master.

All photos by Lydia Carey

It’s mid-morning in Monterrey, Mexico, when Humberto Villareal—“Beto”—picks me up, but it’s already blazing hot. The air-conditioning running, his car is laced with the smell of cigarettes, and his gravelly northern accent takes me a minute to get accustomed to. Beto is a friend of a friend and a local chef in Monterrey. Today, in the early spring heat, he’s going to teach me how to make cabrito, Monterrey’s most iconic dish of baby goat.

Cabrito has a long history in the cuisine of Nuevo León, the state of which Monterrey is the capital. The region’s earliest...

Mike Hess Brewing (courtesy of CityPASS)

In this guest post, our discount-snagging friends at CityPASS share some of their favorite spots for eating and drinking (local beer, natch) in sunny San Diego. Fish tacos, anyone?

San Diego’s near-perfect weather and waves draw in the surfers and sand castles, but it’s the city’s food and drink that make San Diego a uniquely delicious destination. Enjoy your time as a local would with this guide to San Diego restaurants and breweries. First up? Get to know our two favorite areas, Ocean Beach and the Uptown area of North Park and Hillcrest.

Ocean Beach. Courtesy of Brian Roberts/Flickr

Ocean Beach welcomes people from all walks of...

All photos by Gigi Griffis

Saskatoon.

When I decided to road-trip across Canada, this small city in the prairie province of Saskatchewan was little more than a stop in between up-and-coming Winnipeg and gateway-to-the-parks Calgary. The prairies of Canada were a necessary evil, something I had to get across in order to get from charming French Canada to the jagged peaks of the national parks.

Little did I know, I’d come to love the prairies for their own sakes. For their vast open spaces. For their bright yellow fields of canola flowers—an industry that contributes $26.7 billion in Canada each year and that makes the prairie fields look like strange, beautiful art pieces. And,...

An easy recipe for limoncello, your new favorite DIY tipple.

All photos courtesy of Stephanie Andrews

Limoncello: It’s a tummy tamer, an after-dinner delight. Italy’s liquid courage. Behold the power of lemons and their ability to quickly turn your evening into a whirling dervish if you aren’t careful. This isn’t something you knock back like a pint, lest you be knocked right on your butt.

When I touched down in Florence, after weeks of weary travel, I had no idea that this city and its love for this neon libation would leave such a lasting impact—and, fortunately, no headache. After every evening meal, once our plates had been whisked away, a small cocktail glass appeared in...

“People across the world associate Tabasco sauce with the very unique, flavorful food culture found here in Louisiana, and we’re honored to be a part of that.”  —John Simmons, tabasco pepper expert, McIlhenny Company, Avery Island

Hot sauce is like salt in Louisiana. People add it to everything.

In New Orleans, about 140 miles east of Tabasco’s headquarters, food is known for its bold spicing. Cayenne pepper gives crawfish their delicious tang, while jalapeños add a subtle, savory kick to cornbread. And Tabasco, perhaps the most famous Louisiana hot sauce, lends its punch to potato chips, mayonnaise, Bloody Marys, and even ice cream.

We wanted to know more about the latter’s...

In Sevilla, traditional local sweets, made by cloistered nuns, abound inside centuries-old convents. You just have to find them.

Plaza de España, Sevilla. Courtesy of Francisco Collinet/Flickr.

“Ave Maria,” comes the soft unseen voice.

Not sure of the proper response to the greeting, I simply say, “Buenas dias,” then: “Una caja media, por favor.”

The conversation takes place through the metal grillwork inside the entryway to the Convent of San Leandro; I am there to buy the sweets that the cloistered nuns are famous for. The Augustinian sisters at San Leandro, like several other convents in Sevilla, support themselves through their skills in the kitchen.

After a few...

Our picks for eating and drinking in Japantown, San Francisco.

Japantown mural. All photos by Mary Charlebois

Ethereal tonkotsu, silky ramen. Tangy, crisp pickles. Sushi, sashimi, spicy-sweet ginger, and sake. Sweet, chewy mochi. Soak it all up with 36 hours in San Francisco’s Japantown.

Six square blocks embody Japanese food, history, and culture. Traditional and modern ideals thrive side by side: kimonos and cosplay, silk paintings and anime, antique bowls and dollar-store plastic. Japanese-language signs describe produce at the corner market. There are noodle shops and hibachis, tea and sake. A pagoda made of cement. Lattes and matchas served at the same counter. Youngsters...

On a recent trip to Krakow—in the dead of winter—I was on a self-imposed mission to explore Polish soups. Not the jazzed-up modern versions that often taste so flat and commercial, but the local ones prepared in the traditional way. The soups you encounter in the small towns and villages many outsiders never get to, the kind that take you straight to the warm, comforting soul of Polish cuisine. The results of my soup-scoping mission? These eight soups that are must-eats for anyone interested in Polish food—or anyone who’s a soup-foodie (soupie?) like me.
 

Courtesy of Joymaster/Wikipedia

Zurek (Sour Rye Soup)
This is probably the first Polish soup you’ll hear of. Zurek (also...

Sometimes a dip into another world comes at you fast and furious, and you’re buoyed by its thrill for days. Like that time in Portugal.

I was supposed to just run in for sandwiches.

Our kids had both fallen asleep en route to the Museu Serralves, a short drive from downtown Porto. Scott was behind the wheel. He would drop me off in front of this old-school tasca someone had recommended to us—a casual, traditional bar/eatery called Tasca da Badalhoca, known for its ham sandwiches—pull over, and hope the boys didn’t wake up while the car was unmoving (it happens). I’d be back in a flash.

But when I ran in through the heavy wooden doors, my eyes struggling to adjust to the dim...

Winston-Salem might be better known for Krispy Kreme doughnuts, tobacco-industry ties, and handcrafted wood furniture, but it’s also got an interesting (and edible!) streak of Moravian history in it. Our local writer fills us in. 

Photo courtesy of Visit Winston-Salem

The Moravians who settled in North Carolina traced their faith to the Bohemian priest John Hus, who was burned at the stake in 1415 in present-day Germany for challenging the authorities and principles of the Catholic Church. His followers formed the Unitas Fratrum, or Unity of the Brethren, which spread throughout Bohemia, Moravia—hence the name “Moravians”—and Poland. From there, missionaries headed to Germany...

Some background on Tunisian food—and what to eat in Tunisia.

A market in Kairouan. All photos by Giulia Blocal except where indicated.

Thanks to its strategic position at the crossroads of southern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East, Tunisia has always been a hub for spices, which have been traded in its suks for centuries. Cumin, curcuma, saffron, ginger, cinnamon—Tunisian food is quite spice-forward; even salads have a strong taste. As the saying goes, a man can tell if his wife loves him from the amount of spices she puts in the food: If the food isn’t hot, her love isn’t strong.

Tunisian cuisine is based on typical Mediterranean ingredients: cereals, vegetables,...

Pesto is big in our house. Huge. Pesto with pine nuts, pesto with walnuts. Traditional basil pesto, kale pesto, radish leaf pesto. We love it; our kids love it. It’s probably the best way I know to serve fistfuls of raw greens to unsuspecting toddlers.

But then I was introduced to a new kind of pesto: Peruvian pesto. Well, technically it’s called tallarines verdes, or green noodles, a nod to the spaghetti that’s typically a vehicle for the stuff. There are major differences between this and real Italian pesto, but it is a tangible product of Italian immigrants in Peru, adapted to fit local ingredients and taste. We ordered it one night at a local Peruvian restaurant for my...

Escalivada, Catalan roasted vegetables. Photo courtesy of Driftwood Journals.

In this guest post, our friends at Food Lovers Company—a company run by two Barcelona locals that specializes in authentic culinary experiences for discerning travelers in their city—share a few of their favorite Catalan foods (and drinks). ¡Salud!

Catalonia, in northeast Spain, offers gastronomic pleasures from two important perspectives: the traditional and the modern. This region is, after all, home to one of the best restaurants in the world, El Celler de Can Roca, committed to the avant-garde—and, in our city of Barcelona, plenty of traditional flavors from the kitchens of small bars, wineries, and...

Photo by GusbellSStudio

Breakfast in Tokyo isn’t like your usual breakfast: Most of what you’ll find on your plate in the morning is savory enough to make an excellent lunch or dinner dish. And the meals aren’t only delicious, but they’re also healthier than something like cereal or pancakes.

Break your fast the way locals do with these seven breakfast staples:

1. Steamed Rice (Gohan)

Gohan means “meal.” And how appropriate—steamed white rice (hakumai) or brown rice (genmai) are staples for almost every meal in Japan, so you’re guaranteed to have this for breakfast at least once. The rice comes out a bit stickier than you might be used to, making it easier to pick up with...

All photos courtesy of Trinchero Napa Valley

“[At a family-owned winery], you can think with your heart—it’s not about meeting a bottom line.” –Mario Monticelli, Napa Valley winemaker

If you're like us, you've always wondered 1) what's it like to live and work in the gorgeous Napa Valley, and 2) what's it like to be the person responsible for creating some of the fabulous wine that comes out of there. We recently had the opportunity to learn both from Mario Monticelli of Trinchero Napa Valley Winery, a beautiful, state-of-the-art winery (and one of the wildly successful Trinchero Family Estates' brands) whose family legacy stretches back to 1948, when two Italian immigrants...

Our contributor takes us to Vinicola Urbana, a wine-producing rooftop vineyard (and breath of fresh air) smack-dab in overcrowded Mexico City.

All photos by Lydia Carey

A pseudo-camouflaged sign sits at the entrance of No. 29 on Mexico City’s posh Avenida Presidente Masaryk. Inside, the security guards will probably ignore you, but all the way to the left-hand side of the lobby sits a woman who will direct you to the elevators, up four floors, and into an empty elevator-bank hallway. You’ll hesitate, confused; walking out what looks like an emergency exit, you turn right and are unexpectedly met by a wave of shamrock-shaped leaves, tiny bundles of grapes hanging daintily beneath...

Gnocchi alla Romana with slow-cooker beef shank

We had planned a relaxing day at the beach. Well, as relaxing as one might get with a 1- and 3-year-old. My husband was home from work that day, so I figured it’d be a good night to cook something semi-ambitious. He’d be around to help watch kids while I mixed and cut gnocchi alla Romana, or Roman-style gnocchi—a semolina-based gnocchi that predates the Northern potato-dumpling gnocchi we all know, and a recipe I’ve had my eye on for a while.

Ah, plans. What’s that saying about the best-laid ones?? First, we left late because I needed to prep the other half of the meal—slow-cooked beef shanks—and while I was searing the meat...

Our lucky contributor goes behind-the-scenes of barbacoa making in Mexico City.

All photos by Lydia Carey except where indicated.

In every region of Mexico, you will find barbacoa steaming on streetside stands, taking center stage at family gatherings, and being sold by the kilo to hungry market goers. Barbacoa is Mexico’s Sunday brunch, its method is as old as time immemorial, and its recipes continue to evolve at the hands of each barbacoa master, who adds his or her special touch to one of the country’s most quintessential dishes. 

The origin of the word barbacoa is most likely from the West Indies, where it describes a type of grill for cooking meat. In Mexico it refers...

Photo by Isrealtourism/Flickr

Between the sprawling beach lining its western edge and the wide, shady boulevards that roam through it, Israel’s cosmopolitan center visually stuns. But Tel Aviv is more than just its good looks: From street food to top chefs, the cooks and kitchens of this city use fresh, Mediterranean produce, a heavy hand with the local spices, and culinary inspiration from around the globe. Many of Israel’s most famous dishes can be found in some form all over the world, but the unique excellence of the local versions sets them apart. From the pedestrian streets of Carmel Market to the stone paths of Jaffa’s old city, here are five local foods in Tel Aviv that you...

We were excited to hear that Zara Quiroga—Portuguese food and travel writer, and one of the two forces behind travel site Backpack ME—had released an e-book called Lisbon in 100 Bites, for the purely selfish reason that we are planning a food trip there ourselves this fall! But our personal travels aside, Zara and her drool-worthy book are treasure troves of information for anyone interested in Portuguese food and food culture. We asked her a few questions.

You are from Portugal. When and why did you decide to create a Lisbon food book?
I am half Portuguese and half Spanish. I was born and raised in the north of Portugal, in a town called Valença do Minho, right at the border...

Hummus in Tel Aviv. All photos by Naomi Tomky.

Hummus—which hails from all over the Middle East—is a way of life in Israel. A survey recently found that 93% of Israelis eat hummus each week, and some eat it more than six times a week. Unsurprisingly, this means they’ve mastered the art of making and eating it. Sitting down to a bowl of warm, freshly mashed hummus in Israel is nothing at all like the soggy bowls of supermarket paste you find in the U.S. But there’s hope: Here’s how you can aim for a better hummus experience, no matter where you are.

1. Make it fresh. In Israel, the hummus is sometimes still warm from cooking the chickpeas, which gives it a fresh, comforting aspect...

What is Andorran food? Here are 10 local dishes worth seeking out.

Photo by Jordi Troguet Ribes

With a population of only 85,470, the Iberian country of Andorra may be tiny, but it has plenty of attractive lures for visitors: dramatic, craggy mountains; lush forests and meadows; pristine lakes; wintery slopes ideal for snow sports. Not least of all, Andorra is home to an exciting range of foods and flavors, with a cuisine heavily influenced by the country’s unique location in the Pyrenees, sandwiched between Spain and France.

The effect on Andorran food is palpable: The region carries strong infusions of neighboring cuisines, especially Catalan and Provençal, and produces some...

Disclosure: Les Trois Petits Cochons sent us samples of this product free of charge. All opinions are honest and our own (also: unpaid).

Daily life at EYW headquarters has changed quite a bit since we’ve had kids. Gone are the wide-open days (and nights) for tackling website and other freelance work; the hours at the gym; the eons of minutes available for deciding what to do for dinner. Now it’s a juggling act of babysitters and preschool; working during naps, squeezing in playground time, and scrambling to make dinner while keeping the crawling baby safe (from both his older brother and himself). An occasional respite during that hectic after-school time is a magic thing called...

All photos courtesy of Naomi Tomky                                                        

“[Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda Market] is not just about the fresh food. It is also a window onto this city’s culture and personality.” —Joel Haber, culinary tour guide in Israel

Joel Haber, also known as “Fun Joel” (and he does live up to that moniker), offers custom tours of all aspects of Israel, but he specializes in our favorite part: Jerusalem’s central market, called Machane Yehuda—or simply, “the Shuk.” When Haber walks the market, greetings come from every direction—vendors and visitors alike, as if he were a popular politician strolling the streets. His vast knowledge of local...

All photos by Coen Wubbels

One thing was certain: Had we searched for dinner on our own upon arriving in Seoul, we never would have eaten fish cakes, rice cakes in gochujang, fried tofu, and anchovies with peanuts for our first meal. We don’t speak Korean, and we hadn’t yet done much research about what to eat here. Where would we have found these dishes? How would we even have known they exist?

My partner, Coen, and I were in luck. A Korean couple had followed our travel adventures on our website for a while, and when they learned we were coming to their country, Jin and Suna offered us accommodation in their home. Local people inviting you to their homes is always a gift, but...

Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris (Scott B. Rosen/Eat Your World)

In this guest post, our savvy friends at INSIDR—a service that provides travelers with a digital guide to explore Paris like a local—share what a typical day of eating looks like for a Parisian. Spoiler alert: There’s a lot of wine.

To really feel Parisian, you’ll have to eat like one. A few tips: Avoid grabbing a bite around the main tourist sites, where you’ll mostly find overpriced average bistros, tourist traps, and the usual international fast food chains. (The Champs-Elysées area is probably the worst place to have a decent lunch or dinner, so plan accordingly!) Instead, seek out non-touristy spots and learn the...

In this new occasional series, we’ll review international food products on the market that our readers may be interested in. Disclosure: Upton’s Naturals sent us samples of this product free of charge. All opinions are honest and our own (also: unpaid).

If you’ve seen jackfruit before, you’re unlikely to forget it: It’s going to be the largest fruit in any spread. I see it all the time here in Queens, where we have a sizable Asian population, a hulking greenish-yellow fruit with spiky reptilian skin. But despite vague memories of tasting—and loving—sweet, ripe jackfruit in Vietnam once upon a time, and even stronger memories of an excellent cardamom-scented jackfruit appetizer at...

Photo courtesy of Tony Hammond/Flickr

As a visitor to Venice, you may think the foods to try are the Italian classics: Pasta and pizza are, after all, the foods we associate with this beautiful country. Enjoy those all you want, but of course we’re going to say this: Don’t overlook the Venetian specialties that are the true essence of this great city. Below, a short guide of what foods to eat in Venice. Seek these out for an authentic taste of Venice, past and present.
 

Photo from Wikimedia

Risotto al Nero di Sepia / Squid Ink Risotto

Even if squid isn’t your favorite shellfish, Venetian squid ink risotto will win you over. This delicious dish combines the sweetness of...

Our friends at Eat Mexico tell us why the Merced Market is a Mexico City must-see.

Photos by Christie Pham

Forget what you may have heard about the Merced Market, in Mexico City. In my opinion there is only one real danger: You will, inevitably, time and time again, come home with bags full to overflowing with unnecessary items that you found impossible to resist. Personally, I have at various times and with varying degrees of regret purchased 3 kilos of sliced nopal cactus, a frog tamal, a bag of violet-colored beans from Puebla, a dozen mini tlacoyos that fit in the palm of my hand, and a set of white porcelain espresso cups—and I don’t even own an espresso maker. Each...

“Local food” is the name of the game here at Eat Your World. But what is local food? Sure, we define it every which way on our FAQ page, some of it being quite obvious: native dishes, locally produced foods. It’s the gray area surrounding our definition of “traditional,” however, that always keeps the hunt interesting:

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).

For this reason, we count Middle Eastern food as “local” to Detroit and...

We’ve been a little quiet of late, owing to our ever-expanding EYW family: Scott and I were thrilled to welcome our second son into the world earlier this summer. So we’ve been relying upon some of our far-flung contributors to keep the ball rolling, but soon we’ll be back in the swing of things, hitting the road next month to explore the food scenes of Atlanta and Birmingham. In the meantime, we are continuing our food tours, and I have written for a few other outlets, including a Queens dining roundup for Budget Travel and this guest post for Have Baby Will Travel, a longer, more kid-centric version of a post I wrote for this site about our food trip to Jamaica earlier this year....

Black sheng jian bao, a modern twist on a Shanghai classic

Shanghai is the biggest, and some would say most incredible, city in China. It’s such a vibrant and fast-paced place, it’s no wonder Shanghai cuisine emphasizes snack foods and street eats: Here, you can grab a bite at almost any time of the day. To celebrate that, here are 10 of our favorite street eats and snacks in Shanghai.

All photos by Eating Adventures.

Xiao Long Bao (Soup Dumplings)

Xiao long bao was first made in a dim sum shop in Shanghai in 1871. It is one of the few Shanghainese specialties that have become well known around the world (particularly in New York City, where locals have adopted the dish as...

It might require some legwork, but our contributor found that tracking down vigorón on the streets of Granada was well worth the scavenger hunt.

Photos by Chelsey Perron

It was a sunny day, and the breeze off Lake Nicaragua floated past Granada’s colorful colonial houses. We were on the hunt for a specific dish, one whose name we’d heard murmured by Nicas everywhere: vigorón, Nicaragua’s favorite street food, which is said to have been invented here in Granada, the oldest colonial city in Central America. Where better to try a dish that pays homage to the country’s rural roots than in the shadow of centuries-old Spanish cathedrals? The more we asked, though, the more fingers...

These egg waffles are one of Hong Kong's iconic street foods.

It’s no secret that Hong Kong is a foodie’s mecca. Local Hong Kongers take their food so seriously that people greet each other with the phrase nei sek faan meia: “Have you eaten yet?”

With one of the highest densities of restaurants in the world, visitors are spoiled for choice. Which creates a problem we’d all like to have: Where to start? Here are our tips for 10 must-try foods in Hong Kong:


All photos by Eating Adventures except where indicated.

Roast Goose

Once you’ve had great roast goose there is no turning back—you’ll forever be haunted by the search for more. Goose has succulent red meat, and when...

It doesn’t get much more tipico than this deceptively basic rice-and-beans breakfast, reports contributor (and Costa Rica resident) Chelsey Perron. Meet gallo pinto, Costa Rica's ultimate local dish.

A typical breakfast plate with gallo pinto, from a roadside soda. Photo: Chelsey Perron

Costa Ricans—Ticos, as they’re called here—wake up to a different kind of rooster than most. Gallo pinto, or “spotted rooster,” is so commonly consumed most mornings in local households, it could easily be renamed “breakfast” for many families in this Central American country. The recipe is deceivingly simple: rice, beans, and olores, typically a scant mixture of red sweet peppers (optional),...

You may think of Amstel, Heineken, and, well, other types of highs in Amsterdam before you think “craft beer,” but the Dutch capital has no shortage of terrific microbreweries and impressive beer bars that showcase small-scale Dutch brewers. While we’ve written about this before, we are revisiting it now in honor of a post we contributed to Expedia.com—essentially a love letter to our favorite beer bar in Amsterdam, Proeflokaal Arendsnest.

For more on Arendsnest and our other favorite spots to drink Dutch craft beer in the city, read on:  

Best Brewery: Brouwerij ’t IJ

Founded in 1983, this stalwart of the Amsterdam brewing scene is easy to love: It’s located under a...

Markets are often the best place to experience the very essence of a city's culinary culture—and quickly. Contributor Giulia Blocal brings us this introduction to the food markets of Athens, Greece.


The farmers market at Perissos. All photos by Giulia Blocal.
 

From the heart of the Mediterranean basin, Greek cuisine is composed of a wide variety of dishes mirroring its long history, variegated landscape, and crossroads nature. On a recent trip to Athens, I encountered lots of meat (pork, lamb, beef, goat, chicken, veal, and rabbit), vegetables, and tasty savory pies (including tiropita, layered phyllo pastry filled with cheese, and spanakopita, spinach pie), as well as Greek...

Eleven Madison Park may be the perfect place to celebrate a big anniversary in NYC, at least for two New Yorkers who love the city's culinary traditions, fine dining when it counts, and, you know, each other.


Eleven Madison Park's playful take on the B&W cookie, filled with lemon verbena

Anyone who knows us knows we don’t, for several reasons, make a habit of dining at pricy Michelin-starred restaurants. In fact, Scott and I generally prefer to eat at small, hole-in-the-wall-type places that deal in unpretentious homemade food—like many of the restaurants found in our Queens neighborhood, for example. But certain occasions call for a real culinary splurge, and our 10-year...

Contributor Adam Corre gets stuffed on Addis Ababa’s only guided food tour, a three-restaurant spree that may challenge your perceptions of Ethiopia.


Addis Ababa photo by neiljs

It’s impossible to finish this meal. I feel as though I’ve eaten a lot, but a cursory glance at our large, still-full tray of injera, Ethiopia’s staple food, suggests otherwise. The food has barely diminished. To avoid causing offense, the hosts have been informed this is not an indication of customer dissatisfaction. My insightful guide today is Xavier Curtis, who grew up in Washington, D.C. and became actively involved in the Slow Food movement while studying at the University of Wisconsin. Curtis is...

Team EYW was recently in Port Antonio, where the Blue Mountains meet the sea in northeast Jamaica, to cover the north coast’s local foods for this site. The birthplace of jerk, this gorgeously green, serene region is one that rewards an exploratory spirit—even if you have a two-year-old in tow.

To be perfectly honest, we arrived to Port Antonio, on Jamaica’s lush northeast coast, a little beaten down. Scott and I had just survived a nearly five-hour drive (with stops, including two by the speed-gun-happy local cops) along the coast from Montego Bay, the last two hours slow and winding, with our temperamental nearly two-year-old, and we were already dreading the drive back in a few...

Photo: Pavel L Photo and Video/Shutterstock

When you first travel to a new place, the sights, smells, and sounds are often so new that there’s no question you are somewhere you’ve never been before. Traffic and language sound different. The lights, colors, architecture, cars, and clothing are all worthy of increased attention. The smell of the air itself can even indicate that you’ve arrived somewhere foreign and different.

These senses all combine to highlight the new wonders that await you, but it’s often, of course, when you sit down to a meal in a brand-new place that you truly discover the unnameable heart and soul of wherever you are. Nowhere is this truer than in...

A day trip to Malmö had us wondering: Where are the Swedish meatballs?



Sometimes you have only a few short hours in a new place, and damn it if you won’t make the most of them. Such was the case for our day trip from Copenhagen to Malmö, Sweden, just over the huge Øresund bridge from the Danish capital, where our brief agenda included wandering the streets, stopping in some parks, and eating köttbullar, or what we call Swedish meatballs. Pretty manageable, right?

That’s what we thought, anyway, as we emerged from the train into the bright sunlight last September. Our 17-month-old son was peacefully asleep in a carrier on my chest, and we had plentiful time to wander the quiet,...

Some traditional foods we feature on Eat Your World can be downright unhealthy—think of all the fried chicken and regional hot dogs!—but others, as our intern (and nutritional-science student) Carina found, include superfood ingredients that give a real nutritional boost. We swear.


Chole bhature in Delhi

CURCUMIN

Nutritional benefits: Curcumin, the compound that gives turmeric its pungent flavor and bright-yellow color, is a potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant, enabling our bodies to neutralize harmful free radicals. It reduces plaque buildup in the brain, which is thought to contribute to Alzheimer’s disease [1]. Furthermore, a substantial, lifelong consumption of...

This giveaway has ended. Thanks to all who participated!

Today’s giveaway is a fantastic cookbook, but it’s much more than that: It is history, rich storytelling, a love letter to the South, an education in Lowcountry foodways, and an entertaining read even for those who aren’t in the mood to cook! Introducing The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen, the most recent cookbook by James Beard Award-winning authors, hometown heroes, and siblings Matt Lee and Ted Lee.
 

She-crab soup, one of the 100 recipes in the book

In the authors’ own words:

 “The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen is our most personal book yet. With these stories and recipes, we show you what it was like to grow up...

This new photo series calls on a handful of locals of a city we’re covering to tell us, in one photo—not necessarily of food—what that city means to them. First up, in honor of EYW’s Charleston Food Week, is Charleston, South Carolina.

"Enjoying a fresh-brewed sweet tea among the tea trees of North America's only tea plantation. Much like the rest of the city, Charleston Tea Plantation on Wadmalaw Island is both beautiful and delicious."—Scott Wink, Charleston Food Bloggers

Follow Charleston Food Bloggers on Twitter @FoodBloggersCHS and Instagram @charlestonfoodbloggers

“We love this photo because it dramatizes how insuppressible and anarchic the botanical aspect of...

Our destination spotlight on Charleston features some of our favorite Lowcountry dishes, but that’s not all: Stay tuned this week for a slew of fun Charlestonian giveaways across all our social media channels—follow #EYWCharleston to find them! Our first one is here: Leave a comment to enter to win a package of benne wafers, Charleston’s signature sesame-seed cookie, courtesy of Southern Sisters Bakery.  [Contest is now closed; see comments for winner!]

Charleston is a real pleasure to eat in. It’s a pleasure for the other senses, too—the gorgeous 200-year-old homes; the long, flat, ideal-for-strolling coastlines; the salty, swampy breezes—but food is a definite draw down here, and...

We mean: outside of Noma. But must the word Noma be in every title of every article about Copenhagen dining?

Dessert at Relæ

To many an eater, Copenhagen means Noma, chef-owner René Redzepi’s temple to hyper-local Nordic ingredients, and the restaurant that’s topped the list of the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants for four of the past five years. But for those who cannot secure one of its 45 highly sought-after seats—or shell out the US$500 a head or so for its 20-plus courses with wine—there are plenty of other places in which to experience the Danish capital’s superstar rise to gastronomic fame. Copenhagen, you see, has had its culinary landscape transformed by the...

We are the first to admit these cookies don’t qualify as “regional food”—unless, of course, you were to look at American holiday cuisine as a whole, but that’s a stretch, isn’t it? The thing is, we don’t bake much in the way of sweets, but these have become something of a Halloween tradition for us, delicious and adorable and simple to make, and therefore worth sharing with our food-loving readers. The “artistic” part of making those spiders is a bit labor-intensive, truth be told, but overall this is a pretty easy way to impress your friends/kids/coworkers. (And you get to eat the ones you mess up.)

This recipe from Jen’s Favorite Cookies has never let us down, although we add a...

Turkish breakfast in Istanbul

Check out Eat Your World cofounder Laura Siciliano-Rosen in the latest “Find Dining” podcast from Taste Trekkers, a similar-minded website for foodies who love to travel and travelers who love food. Topics covered in this 52-minute episode include: travel writing; must-try dishes and restaurants in New York City, Istanbul, Charleston, Rhode Island, and the Riviera Maya (Mexico); and how to find local food when you travel. Get to know Laura and Eat Your World a lot better!  

Click here to listen to the podcast

Special thanks to host/creator Seth Resler and the Taste Trekkers crew for inviting Eat Your World to participate.

This new series will detail the souvenirs—of the culinary variety and otherwise—we pick up on our travels, from pimiento cheese in Charleston to roasted ants from Colombia.

Copenhagen is the type of city where you walk into a store and you want to buy everything: chairs, light fixtures, a $100 pillow you have no use for. Danish design is famously simple and functional and, well, gorgeous. But if you don’t have the extra bucks to spend—or if your shopping time is extremely limited due to a tagalong toddler, as was our case—you’ll have to satisfy yourself with some oohing and aahing and moving right along. Fortunately, there are other ways to take a little bit of Denmark home with...

Papri chaat: a tour favorite [photo: Sam Kolich]

For years now, Scott and I have taken our friends, and friends of friends, on an informal food tour of our deliciously diverse neck of Queens: Jackson Heights and Elmhurst. Here is a 12-block or so radius that encompasses restaurants, cafes, and street vendors from at least as many countries, including but not limited to India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet, Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, Korea, Thailand, and China. The food is not only fun and educational to try; walking around here provides the rare opportunity to cross continents, to interact with immigrants from around the globe, in the space of just a few hours. It’s the New York City...

Some required viewing for when you don’t want to cook, you don’t feel like reading, and you’ve already eaten.

Chef (2014)

This cooking comedy, filmed in mock-documentary style, emphasizes the influence that modern social media can have on a chef’s reputation. Directed by and starring Jon Favreau, the audience gets an insider’s perspective of what it’s like to be the head chef of a once hoity-toity Los Angeles restaurant. Chef Carl Casper (Favreau) can’t deny that his cooking has seen better days when an unpitying food critic dines at his restaurant and tweets about how disappointing the meal was. Furious, Carl, once known for his creative food, becomes more famous for the...

We are happy to announce that we’ve recently released two more eBooks on Amazon Kindle—the Mexico City Food & Travel Guide and the Coastal Yucatán Food & Travel Guide—bringing our grand total of books up to 10! Like all of the others, these are easily downloadable not only to a Kindle device but to your smartphone or tablet using the (free) Kindle app.

The Mexico City guide is a must when navigating the often-intimidating capital—for just $1.99, it directs you to 32 iconic local foods and drinks (complete with map links to specific vendors, photos, and contextual background), from pulque and tacos de canasta to the hyper-regional soup caldo Tlalpeño, and give you the confidence...

We always wish we had more time to explore the nooks and crannies of the New England coast, the quaint downtowns and salty enclaves nestled between our usual destinations of New Haven, Providence, Boston, and Cape Cod. But until we make that rambling road trip happen, we are content with stopovers for good grub on our way up the coast to visit the Cape every summer. Recent years have taken us to Cranston for an icy Del’s lemonade and to Fall River for our favorite Portuguese pastries, but this year we had seafood on the brain. Here are a few great new-to-us spots:
 

Abbott’s Lobster in the Rough
Generally the first thing that comes to mind when we’re in the car, driving north...

Fifteen months ago, our lives changed forever when we welcomed our son into this world. Like all new parents, we’ve had to figure out a lot since then—how to keep our baby healthy, how to sleep more than three hours a night, and, eventually, how to maintain some semblance of our former traveling-food-explorer lifestyles. Fortunately—for now, anyway—our little guy fits right in, with an impressive appetite and a willingness to try almost anything, from frog legs in Kentucky to Nepali momos at home in Queens. Until we have to deal with tricking him to eat anything that’s not brown, here are our tips for feeding yourself and your baby local eats while on the road.

At work on Isla...

Some required memoir reading for fans of eating, cooking, and traveling.
 

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table (2009)
by Molly Wizenberg

In this coming-of-age memoir, Molly Wizenberg, creator of the Orangette food blog, describes how she discovered her true calling to the culinary world while studying abroad in Paris. After the difficult death of her father, Wizenberg distracted herself by capturing her kitchen adventures in what she thought of as a silly food blog. One online follower turned into thousands, and she soon realized that what she’d cooked and eaten all her life were her keys to success.
Places you’ll read about: Oklahoma, California,...

A chili cheese dog from Pink's, a Hollywood icon

Summer is prime hot dog season in the U.S., when warm temps invite grilling, beer drinking, and lazy hand-held-sandwich eating. This Friday, wiener consumption will hit its yearly peak: Every July 4, Americans put away an estimated 150 million hot dogs, a nice chunk of which will probably be consumed at Coney Island, Brooklyn, during the annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest championship. It’s fitting, perhaps—the neighborhood represents the birthplace of hot dogs in the U.S. (via the Germans, of course)—but the Nathan’s dog is just one of many around the country with which people will be stuffing their faces this summer. Hot...

If you've been to the Netherlands recently, chances are you're missing the stroopwafel, or "syrup waffle." The good news is, it's not too hard to make these Dutch sweets back home.

The stroopwafel is a cookie unique to the Netherlands; it’s been eaten there for centuries. The history of this delicacy dates back to 1784, when a baker from the town of Gouda baked a waffle using old crumbs and spices, and filled it with syrup. Because it was made with leftovers, the stroopwafel was, at the time, a popular pastry among the poor, known only in Gouda. Today, every bakery in Gouda has its own particular recipe for these delicious sweet, sticky waffles, and they’re found across the...

In Madagascar, ravitoto is a dish the Malagasy “came home to, a dish mothers and wives lovingly prepared, and a dish that, despite regional and tribal differences, the entire nation could agree on loving.” Here's where to find it, and how the author came to understand it.


We never said ravitoto was pretty (credit).

Though relatively unknown in the West, cassava, also called manioc or yucca, has long been an important staple food throughout much of Africa (and elsewhere), including Madagascar and the rest of the sub-Saharan region, showing up in restaurants and markets, and on family’s tables, nearly as often as french fries in the U.S. (see also: cassava leaf stew in Sierra...

Drive down to the Maine Avenue Fish Market, in southwest D.C., early on a Saturday evening, and you may immediately regret it. Cars are everywhere, vying for parking and backed up in slow-moving lines; a parade of people move toward the open-air seafood counters, where more long lines await; wholesale trucks pull into the middle of the space to unload or pick up crabs at what seem like inopportune times. It’s crowded and chaotic, it smells like fish, you will wait on long lines, and if you happen to have a one-year-old like we do, well, he won’t be happy about it. But as all the locals who drive out of their way to stop here know, the haul you get will be dirt-cheap and super...

Just in time for the FIFA World Cup opener on June 12, our paulista writer dishes on what to eat and where in São Paulo, Brazil.

São Paulo skyline. Photo: Filipe Frazao/Shutterstock.com

Anthony Bourdain is not a big fan of São Paulo: According to him, the biggest city in Brazil “feels like Los Angeles threw up on New York.” It’s true that to fall in love with this place, you have to look past the jammed traffic and the concrete jungle. But once you do, you’ll discover a city that never sleeps, with many museums, theaters, lively nightlife, and terrific food, the complexity of flavors tucked into nooks and crannies, contributed by the Portuguese, the Italian, and a host of other...

Steeped in tradition, Jewish delis around the United States are beloved, often generations-old fixtures. Many of them share similar characteristics—a homey yet straightforward vibe, encyclopedic menus, the familiar routine of big, delicious portions served fast—but their historic natures tend to reflect region as well: pastrami samples at the ready at Katz’s in New York, local farmhouse cheeses at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Italian hot dogs at Harold’s in Edison, New Jersey. In California, Jewish delis have taken on the characteristics of the region’s culinary culture as well, beginning with their emphasis on seasonal produce. Here are some hallmarks diners might recognize when...

“I fell in love with the story of my family’s business. It was a story I wanted to tell.” —Davide Dukcevich, co-owner, Daniele, Inc.

We were fortunate to meet Davide and his products recently, and were impressed by how straight-outta-Italy the prosciutto and mortadella tasted. It’s no wonder, given the history of the family business: His grandparents, Croatian refugees who landed in northern Italy after WWII, made sausages there for decades before their son, Davide’s father, brought the business to Rhode Island in 1977. Today, Davide and his brother, Stefano, are running things, overseeing the production of traditionally dry-cured, regionally sourced meats from prosciutto and...

It was our first night in Chiang Mai. After a 24-hour journey of buses, overnight trains, and general mishap, all my friend Noele and I wanted were long showers and a great meal. Before this trip, we’d had dreams of Thailand’s notorious midnight raves, but even then, our real draw to the “country of smiles” was the food. We wanted authentic pad Thai, exotic fruits, robust coffee—all of it. 

We found our addiction early on. We were seated at the night market, surrounded by one of everything—heaping plates of fried rice, stir-fried seafood with sprigs of leafy basil—but our forks couldn’t stop dipping into the som tam. The spicy green-papaya salad has long been a favorite in many...

Rhode Island chef Tim McGrath (right) at the Taste of Providence event

We’ve always known Rhode Island has great local food—over several visits, we’ve sampled the excellent stuffed quahogs and tangy pizza strips; we’ve dug into doughboys and sipped coffee milk with hot wieners. But the vibrant food scene in the Ocean State certainly doesn’t end at the quirky regional stuff; there’s a wealth of chef-driven, locavore-centric restaurants in Providence and beyond—and we were lucky enough to have them come to us last week.

The Taste of Providence NYC media event featured a trio of chefs from three Providence restaurants cooking a multicourse lunch at the Institute of Culinary...

Le Comptoir. Photo by chef-owner Segue Lepage

In the course of our Montréal food research, prior to our last trip there, our Airbnb host was one of several locals we asked to weigh in on the dishes and drinks we proposed to cover. He gave a lot of great input, but it was the line about visiting one of “Montréal’s classic buvettes,” which he described as “something between a wine bar and a gastropub,” that caught my eye. What was this mysterious class of restaurant we don’t have in America?

Turns out, buvettes are pretty accurately described as wine bars meet gastropubs, and they definitely belong in any conversation about modern-day Montréal gastronomy, certainly because of the...

A new trend in the culinary world is making it a lot easier to taste local delicacies from far-flung  places: food-filled subscription boxes that show up at your doorstep every month or so. While we’ll always be proponents of going out and tracking food down, we have to admit it’s super fun to get a box of food in the mail. Here are two that we recently tried.

CARNIVORE CLUB 
https://carnivoreclub.co; ; $50/month for members

Toronto-based Carnivore Club bills itself as “the ultimate meat of the month club for discerning individuals,” which is to say people who are interested in receiving handsomely boxed monthly shipments of high-quality, artisanal charcuterie from purveyors...

We are kind of obsessed with Suriname and its multicultural cuisine. Where else do Dutch, Indonesian, Indian, Chinese, African, and Caribbean influences mix and mingle so freely? From what we’ve heard, anyway: We have not actually been to Suriname. Yet.

But we have been to Amsterdam, and great Surinamese food abounds there. You see, tiny Suriname, located on the northern coast of South America, is a former Dutch colony. When Suriname was granted independence in 1975, its people were given the choice of Surinamese or Dutch citizenship, and nearly half of the population at that time opted to migrate to the Netherlands, bringing their intriguing cuisine with them.

(Holland is, it...

Lokum, or Turkish delight, from Istanbul

Our Istanbul Food & Travel Guide is here! It’s our eighth destination guide on Kindle ($5.99; available on Amazon.com), but it’s extra special because it’s an Amazon exclusive—that’s right, this food guide is available on Amazon before it’s even on our website! (Think of it as an early release of our future kickass Istanbul section.)

Given Turkey’s epic history, you could spend years studying and sampling the cuisine of Istanbul—but if you don’t have that luxury of time, this new guide is for you. Here, we zero in on the most iconic of Istanbul’s foods and drinks—the greatest hits, you might say, from history and popular culture, from...

Dearborn, a city within the Detroit metropolitan area, has a long-established Arab-American population, accounting for some 40% of the total population—the largest proportion among U.S. cities of similar size. The first Arab immigrants, mostly Syrian/Lebanese Christians, migrated for auto-industry work around the turn of the 20th century (the Ford Motor Company is headquartered in Dearborn; Henry Ford once lived here); they were soon followed by Palestinians, Jordanians, Yemenis, and Chaldeans/Iraqis. Today Dearborn is not only home to North America’s largest mosque, but also countless Middle Eastern groceries, bakeries, and restaurants. Got business in Detroit? A Middle Eastern...

Edam cheese. Photo: Yvwv

Yucatecan food—even that found along the so-called Riviera Maya, the coastal corridor between Cancún and Tulum—is markedly different from “Mexican food” as most of us know it, as we learned while traveling the region last week. One reason is, of course, the pronounced Mayan influence, but many more groups have left their mark on the cuisine here as well, from the British and Spanish to the Lebanese and even the Dutch. The latter’s influence can be witnessed in one enduring main ingredient—Edam cheese, called queso de bola here—and is particularly unexpected for someone who’s traveled across much of Mexico before. No one knows for sure how the cheese got...

Tacos for breakfast in Tulum

Traditionally, Scott and I are stay-up-late, wake-up-late kind of people. This all changed a year ago, of course, when our son was born and the definition of “waking up late” became 8am. Most days we’re in bed by 11pm and up by 7am, though baby boy has pushed the 6am envelope more times than I would prefer. On Mexico’s Yucatán coast last week, however, where the time difference was a small but still meaningful-in-a-baby’s-world two hours, all bets were off.

We’d heard the horrors of time-change travel with babies, one reason why we rather timidly selected east-coast Mexico for this trip (it’s also a nicely manageable four-hour flight from New York)....

Contrary to what you might gather from your neighborhood Chinese eatery, there isn’t really a fixed recipe for fried rice. It evolved from throwing leftovers in the wok to stir-fry—one of the sustainable ways the older generation ensured every scrape of food was eaten, not wasted—and voilà, you get a really tasty variety of dishes.

Fried rice tastes best, therefore, with leftover, day-old rice: The grains lose moisture overnight, giving them a harder, crunchier texture—perfect for this dish—and they’re less likely to clump when you stir-fry them with everything else. Cook the rice the night (or at least several hours) before, leave it out to cool for an hour or so, then put it in...

Photo courtesy of Chris Davis

Crawfish boils are a springtime rite of passage in southern Louisiana, whether you’re in a bar, at a festival, or in a friend’s backyard. I’ll never forget the boil we went to, at New Orleans’ Maple Leaf Bar, where a small door fee covered both music and food (the Uptown bar holds crawfish boils on Sunday nights during the season). In an alley outside the bar, we glimpsed the giant pot of critters, and all the delicious stuff going in along with them—mushrooms, corn, potatoes, quail, andouille and boudin sausages—and knew we were in for a treat.

Backyard boils are, of course, more the local way, the equivalent of having friends over for beers and a...

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more perfect snack food than the taco. It's cheap, it's portable, it can comprise a wide range of ingredients—meats, veggies, cheese, salsas—and textures (if you've never had crunchy chicharrón atop your taco, drop everything and go find some). We love tacos all across the U.S.—carne asado in L.A., egg-potato-bean in Austin, our favorite lengua tacos in Queens—but nothing beats the motherland. As we gear up for some travel through the Yucatán Peninsula, where cochinita pibil tacos for breakfast await, here's a look at a few favorite tacos we've met in Mexico.

Taco al pastor
The mighty taco al pastor, local to Mexico City and Puebla: Thin...

This destination spotlight crosses the globe to Cebu, in the central Philippines, an appealing destination for business travelers, beachgoers—and people who like to eat. Our writer, a Cebu resident, demonstrates why in our 20-dish-strong Cebu guide. Here’s a taste.

Camotes Islands, Cebu, two hours by boat off the mainland. Photos by Mona Polo

Located in the center of the 7,107 islands that make up the Philippines, Cebu (“se-boo”) is a tropical playground disguised as a business hub…or is it the other way around? Cebu the island—the province and cosmopolitan capital city share the same name as well—is 156 miles and just 28.8 miles at its widest, so travelers for pleasure or...

If you get our newsletter, you know this already. But the rest of you are in the dark, and that’s not cool (also: sign up for the site and newsletter here).

Quick: Grab your smartphone. Click over to eatyourworld.com.* It’s our new mobile-optimized site!

Sure, there’s a sweet smartphone-ready design, but our goal was to make life a little better for you, dear on-the-go reader. To that end, our mobile site has these new features:

• It’s GPS-enabled! Now you can select “Find Local Foods Near Me” and pull up a Google map pointing you to Eat Your World-approved local eats & drinks nearby.

• Users can now log in and upload food photos to EYW directly from their mobile...

In our new monthly installment, we’re sharing some favorite links we’ve come across this month in the worlds of food, travel, and beyond.

Ceebu jën in Dakar, Senegal

How We Ate in 1964, When the Beatles Were on Ed Sullivan, Vs. Now
Over on BonAppetit.com, the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first performance on The Ed Sullivan Show was celebrated with some fascinating food history. This slide show takes a look at what Americans were eating in 1964—as the Fab Four played to a record-breaking 111.5 million viewers—and how the food scene has changed today. Swanson TV dinners, anyone?
 

Around the World in 80 Dishes
This piece from our friends at Backpack Me is way more than...

I’m a sucker for wintery drinks. Not just of the hot chocolate variety—that’s a given—but also thick, filling, savory drinks, like eggnog, Mexican atole, and this stuff, boza, in Turkey. A traditional fermented drink made from wheat, millet, or bulgur—and onetime favorite beverage of Ottoman sultans—boza is kind of an odd duck: It’s served chilled, it’s thick as pudding, and it’s at turns sour and sweet. It’s typically served topped with cinnamon and crunchy roasted chickpeas, which only makes me love it more.

In Istanbul, we wandered the streets a while before we found Vefa Bozacici, an old-school boza dispenser in the otherwise modernized district of Vefa. There was just one...

Lucky number 7! We’re pleased to announce our seventh destination guide on Kindle: the Oaxaca Food & Travel Guide, now available on Amazon.com. Oaxaca is celebrated for its cuisine, but knowing what to look for—and where to find it, particularly when it comes to navigating the labyrinthine markets and choosing street vendors—is essential. Enter our latest guide, which directs you to 40 delicious dishes and drinks in Oaxaca, from the best tamales and empanadas to the harder-to-find, veggie-fresh sopa de guias. And mole, of course! Aside from our usual How to Burn It Off and Where to Stay info, this guide also includes some bonus recipes from renowned Oaxacan chef, Pilar Cabrera.

Like...

A brief interlude to pay homage to a beloved car and that most freeing of pursuits: the road trip.

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” –Douglas Adams

Last week Scott and I received word from Sydney that our beloved Betsy—a 1984 Ford Laser we bought in Melbourne in 2003—was headed for the scrap yard. In an instant, a flood of memories, some of the best of our shared life, rushed forth—a testament to the role this car, and the epic road trip we embarked upon in it, played in our collective traveling past.

It was April 2003. We’d already quit our New York advertising jobs, put all our stuff in storage, spent a month...

In preparation for this week’s #healthytravel Twitter chat, which we are cohosting with Yahoo! Travel, US. News Travel, and a few others, we got to thinking about how we travel healthy while stuffing ourselves silly—er, we mean, indulging in local delicacies in moderation. And here’s what we came up with.

Are you the type of person who travels in the moment, suspending all diet/exercise goals to eat and drink everything you can get your hands on?

Is your desire to taste the cuisine of a new city greater than your desire to have a salad every day?

Does “healthy travel” sound unexciting or, I don’t know, too healthy for you?

Well, it’s nice to meet you. We’ll get along...Read More

Homemade placintas from the south of Moldova, in Comrat. Photo by Leah Kieff

Placinta. The first time I tasted this traditional fried bread, still warm from the pan, I knew I would love living in Moldova. My first bite was of a Romanian-style placinta—homemade, deep-fried, filled with brinza (homemade cheese, like a drier, saltier feta) and dill—hinting at the dish’s origins in Romania, back when that country was part of the Roman Empire. Nowadays it’s everywhere in neighboring Moldova as well, in just about every alimentara (corner market/convenience store) around the country, the equivalent of a cheap, convenience-store hot dog—though when homemade, it’s also a staple at large...

Maccheroni al pettine

Imagine being sent to Italy, all expenses paid, for the sole purpose of exploring its culinary traditions, eating its foods, and meeting its food producers. Eat Your World recently learned that this exact opportunity is being offered by Australian-based travel gurus World Nomads, in partnership with Can’t Forget Italy, to three lucky applicants: an epicurean “pilgrim,” an aspiring chef/culinarian, and a cultural anthropologist-type. Are you one of them? We talked to World Nomads’ program marketing manager, Alicia Smith, for more details.   
 

World Nomads’ “Passport & Plate: Italy 2014” program sounds incredible. How was the idea born?
World Nomads runs an...

             Eric McKay (left) and Patrick Murtaugh of Hardywood Park

“Richmond has a beer scene similar to what you saw 10 years ago in the Pacific Northwest. The market is not yet saturated and there’s still an enthusiasm for craft beer that borders on fanatical.” —Patrick Murtaugh, cofounder and master brewer, Hardywood Park brewery

Tell us about what you do.
In short, we make beer. We lean toward beers that are stylistically underrepresented in the market. Our Reserve Series is dedicated to using at least one local ingredient in each beer: local wildflower honey, baby ginger, blackberries, raspberries, locally roasted coffee. We also put a lot of effort into trying to engage...

Piment, in Réunion. Photo by Jessie Beck

Mention Réunion to most Anglophone travelers, and they’ll shake their heads: “Where?” Do the same at a dinner table full of travel-savvy French and you’re more likely to evoke a chorus of oohs before the conversation turns to tropical weather, volcanoes, and—most important—la cuisine creole.

Île de la Réunion, a little island outpost of France, sits in a lonely spot in the Indian Ocean, far from any mainland but comfortably nestled between Madagascar and Mauritius. Though technically considered an African island, visitors would be hard-pressed to identify the island’s personality, culture, and cuisine as purely African. Instead, its unique...

It’s no secret that we love New Orleans—the food, the cocktails, the music, the attitude. So it’s with great pleasure that we release NOLA as our sixth destination guide on Kindle, with newly updated content thanks to a recent revisit. In it, we direct readers to 40 quintessentially New Orleans dishes and drinks, from our favorite BBQ shrimp to the best handmade daiquiris and everything in between. We also provide suggestions for How to Burn It Off (good luck!) and Where to Stay, and—as a bonus—we’re giving you a detailed three-day itinerary, i.e., A Perfect Weekend in New Orleans.

Check it out on Amazon now!

Like our existing guides, it’s conveniently downloadable to your Kindle,...

Inside the now-defunct Billy's Cafe, Fall River. Photos by Scott Rosen.

Fall River, Massachusetts, is the kind of town most people drive through to get someplace else. Once a center of textile manufacturing, it’s long since fallen on rough economic times, and is now rather gray and desolate in stretches, even despite the picturesque Braga Bridge and “Gates of the City,” the latter a gift from its sister city in the Azores. For us, it’s usually a pit stop en route to Cape Cod. Fortunately, there’s always been something in Fall River that makes pulling off the highway worth our while: killer Portuguese food.

Pastéis de nata from a Fall River bakery

Fall River, along with other...

Nem, a spring roll-like street food in Madagascar.

Near the daily market of Antsirabe, the pleasant hillside town of Madagascar’s highlands (and third-largest city in the country), women with enormous bowls of batter sit next to sizzling pots of oil over low charcoal stoves. While crouching or sitting on wooden stools, they fan their flames and plop their freshly fried goods into mountainous piles of steaming fresh snacks. Also lining the streets are small display boxes filled with bowls of breads, noodles, salads, even spaghetti. Other vendors mingle with the crowd, hawking their wares to shoppers while balancing plastic containers atop their heads. While the Malagasy staple...

We are happy to announce the release of our fifth destination guide on Kindle: the Montréal Food & Travel Guide. Canada’s second-largest city is best known for poutine and smoked meat, but this guide goes far beyond that to point readers to the most regional of Québécois foods, the French-bistro classics, the local microbrews, even the trendy cuisine de terroir restaurants. And we tell you how to eat and drink all of it in five days (bonus itinerary!), plus give recommendations for burning it off and where to stay.

Check it out on Amazon now!

Like our Amsterdam, London, Delhi, and New York guides, it’s conveniently downloadable to your Kindle, smartphone, or tablet for just...Read More

Thank you to all who participated in our recent Taiwan contest! We had asked for Facebook likes on users' photo uploads—it was a close race, but we’re ready to announce our winners.

The grand prize winner, who will receive a free night in Taipei at Bigfoot Hostel plus NTD 1,000/US$35, is user evyyang, with 121 Facebook likes on her upload of a frosty Taiwanese dessert. May we suggest you spend your winnings on more of these sweets, Evy?

Frozen ice with fresh local fruits

But that's not all! Our second- and third-place winners will also receive a free night at Bigfoot in Taipei for their popular uploads:

Grilled king oyster mushrooms, by user mintmaple

Pounded...

I woke up to a loud pitter-patter on my tin roof—another cold, gray morning in central Cambodia. The rainy season had stretched on for weeks and left me with a perpetual sniffle and a cough I couldn’t shake. I needed to eat something to warm my belly.

I ventured into my village’s winding market for breakfast, the dirt ground muddy and wet. Older ladies and schoolchildren grabbing a meal before class hunched below the market’s makeshift sheet-metal rooftops, slurping up porridge from mismatched sets of porcelain bowls. I settled in at my favorite vendor’s stall, a little stand with nothing more than a rice cooker, a portable burner, a sagging wooden bench, and a young girl with a...

Housemade charcuterie from Chef Joe Sparatta/Heritage

Nothing beats eating the local foods of a region while you’re on the ground in that region—tracking down the traditional dishes, tasting the modern updates, drinking the local beer, perusing the markets, trying what you cannot try “back home.” That is, after all, the founding principle of this website. But we’re grateful that here in New York City, sometimes the local foods of far-flung places—and the chefs who work magic with them—come to us. Lately we've been on a kick with the regional foods of small(ish)-town America, which actually makes it all the more interesting—cities we’d never before considered in a culinary sense are...

Contributor Jessie Beck hunts down Ethiopia’s favorite raw-beef dish.

Photo by Jessie Beck.

Before I landed in Ethiopia, my knowledge of Ethiopian food went no further than a few dinners on 14th Street in Washington D.C., where a large diaspora of Ethiopians and Eritreans have set up shop and, accordingly, some great Ethiopian restaurants. I only vaguely knew the ingredients of what I was eating. I became familiar with injera, the spongy fermented bread used to soak up and grasp other foods, but what were those little piles sharing the platter with it? Lentils? Beans? Cabbage? Even in my ignorance, I still loved trekking out to those places to get my hands messy dipping injera...

The “Best of Bentonville” chefs at work in the James Beard House kitchen

We’ll be honest: Ozarks cuisine was never really at the top of our want list. When we thought of that rural region, which extends across southern Missouri into northwestern Arkansas and parts of Oklahoma and Kansas, we mostly thought of Walmart (it has its corporate headquarters in the area) and that depressing Winter’s Bone movie. Maybe they hunt squirrel there?

But then we were invited, on behalf of Bentonville, Arkansas’s esteemed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, to the James Beard House, in the West Village, for a showcase of regional food from the area, featuring chefs from four downtown...

For this dish spotlight, we turn to Moravia and its uber-seasonal burčák wine, which contributor Christopher Burdick recently had the pleasure of tracking down for us.

photo by Mararie

“It tastes like delicious, carbonated, innocent grape juice. But it’s far from innocent. Start drinking early and the next thing you know it’s 1am, you’ve had two liters, and suddenly it’s not so easy to stand up.”

I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for booze that’s specific to a region. If someone tells me I can’t get it anywhere else, it’s down my throat faster than they can say “Prost!” Usually this sort of thing involves shots of strong liquor, like Serbian rakija or the infamous “green fairy”...

In teeny Rhode Island, our usual city spotlight becomes a state spotlight—and what a state for local food it is. Hot wiener with coffee milk, anyone?  

Local seafood in Providence

We’d heard of the hot dog with the funny name—the New York system—likely from a TV show over the years. But that was pretty much the extent of our knowledge, pre-research, of typical Rhode Island eats. Then we heard from Dayna, a family friend and Cranston local whom we’d emailed for initial ideas. She replied with a laundry list of “oddies,” as she called them, and nearly introduced us to a whole new vocabulary in the process: gaggahs with the works, awful awful, doughboys, stuffies. Is Rhode Island...

Tsua bing, or shaved ice, in Taiwan. Photo by user hungryel

One look at the images in our Taiwan section, and it’s no surprise the island is such a beloved food destination. The Eat Your World team dreams of one day feasting in the streets and night markets of Taipei, but before we get there, we’re going to help some travelers with their own visit: We’re giving away a free night at a popular downtown hostel to a few lucky travelers—and a cash prize to one (may we suggest spending it on food?). To enter, all you have to do is upload a photo or story about local food to EYW…and then tell all your friends: The three users whose entries receive the most Facebook LIKES win!

HOW TO...

We like a good Q&A, and we enjoy being on either side of one—asking the questions or providing the answers. This month, between some regional travel, lots of Rhode Island writing, weighing in on smart travel for Budget Travel, and—oh, yeah!—being the new parents of an adventurous six-month-old, we were fortunate to participate individually in two new ones.
 

Our friends at Webflakes.com interviewed me, and I was happy to oblige—and happy to learn about their new site, which aggregates lifestyle content from bloggers around the world and translates it into English via a community of volunteers. Content discovery plus translation means you can learn about, say, why Japanese jeans...

Montserrat in Catalonia, Spain (photo: Laura Siciliano-Rosen).

It’s no secret that Spain is home to a rich culinary landscape. From sprawling vineyards to thriving fisheries and lush mountains teeming with life, the diversity of natural resources here is staggering. Perhaps nowhere is the richness of Spanish gastronomy better exemplified than in Catalonia, in northeast Spain. This region’s unique fusion of flavors takes full advantage of the local mar i muntanya (sea and mountain) while also incorporating culinary influences from nearby France, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Africa. And although tomato, olives, aubergine, and bolets (mushrooms) may be the first foods to come to mind...

Traditional dishes from Zirita, a culinary workshop, in Morelia.

Morelia, capital of the state of Michoacán, Mexico, is quietly beautiful, the kind of pretty where the dowdy female lead takes off her glasses, shakes out her ponytail, and wows the guy at the end of a rom-com. The food, though, is exactly the opposite: It’s the mean girl with the tiny waist who knows how to wield a fierce high heel—or, in Morelia’s case, a fierce tamale. A recent eating whirlwind through the historic center, a UNESCO World Heritage site sprinkled with pale pink stones, revealed a ferocious food culture: hot with chile negro, strong with the bold flavors of local fruits and vegetables, and woven...

Our fourth destination guide on Kindle isn’t just any old guide: It’s personal. New York City is our home, for well over a decade now. And as you might imagine, we are often asked where one should eat in New York. It’s a loaded question, really. There are so many options, and so many great suggestions based on what one’s looking for. For the New York City Food & Travel Guide, as on our website, we focus on the traditional, the old-school, the quintessentially New York. If you’re looking for a guide to the city’s hottest restaurants, this ain’t it.

But for a visitor to New York—heck, even for those locals who get caught up in trends—these are all the dishes, and the places selling...

A recent jaunt through NOLA had one of our friends pronounce, at the end of a long night, "I think I've drunk every drink this town has to offer." Did she, though? (She was still standing, so it's highly unlikely!)

It's a task easier said than done, that's for sure. No less than five classic cocktails trace their origins back to the old-line Creole restaurants and divey drinking dens of New Orleans, and a slew of others have somehow migrated down to the bayous, gradually adopting the Big Easy as their home. Then there's the regional craft beers, the quirky lunchtime 25-cent martinis, and the more modern mixology-driven drinks on the scene today. Too much to handle in one sitting?...

It was a rainy morning, as usual, in Galicia. At the weekly mercado de abastos, bustling with shoppers from nearby villages, a huge tent with communal wood tables and an enormous pile of wooden plates waited for customers to arrive, myself included. Outside, in the entrance, a line of cauldrons bubbled while the pulpeiras dipped pieces of octopus in and out—one, two, three times—before releasing them to the boiling depths. Nearby, a woman sliced up the cooked tentacles, laying them upon the wooden plates; a man next to her finished the dish—called polbo á feira—with a sprinkle of salt and Spanish hot paprika, and a generous drizzle of olive oil. It proved an efficient...

The French Riviera is known for its beaches, yachts, and famous film festival, but its largest town, Nice, is also a dream destination for foodies. An abundance of produce thrives in the mild Mediterranean climate; picturesque farmers markets and reputed local restaurants offer a feast for the eyes as well as the taste buds. While the salade Niçoise is Nice’s most-traveled dish, the jewel in the Côte d’Azur’s glittering crown has an abundance of lesser-known local specialties just waiting to be discovered by hungry visitors.

La Socca
The definitive Niçois snack, la socca is best served as an aperitif with a chilled glass of Côtes de Provence rosé. No knife and fork required,...

What is it about this soft, chewy candy that’s so transporting? Maybe it’s the packaging: bright, happy colors; wax paper wrappers; pastel boxes depicting beach panoramas. Maybe it’s the sweet creamy taste, or the sticky texture that makes you feel like a kid again. But likely it’s the fact that it’s so steeped in Jersey Shore history to be entwined with the area forever. As the legend goes, an Atlantic City boardwalk peddler’s candy store was flooded by ocean water one day in the late 1880s, and when a child came in asking for taffy, the peddler joked that what he had was “saltwater taffy.”

Like taffy to teeth, the name stuck.

Saltwater taffy, so ubiquitous at the Shore as to...

Mantı. We tried the beloved Turkish ravioli, filled with ground lamb or beef, three different ways in our travels around the country. In Kayseri, in Central Anatolia, whose version of the dish is most famous, the boiled dumplings are tiny and set afloat in a soupy tomato sauce, dolloped with garlicky yogurt and finished with a sprinkle of oregano, pul biber (red pepper), and chili oil.

Kayseri mantısı

At a roadside cafe in Istanbul we tasted a more standardized mantı, all yogurt, chili oil, and biber, the dumplings folded much larger.

Mantı in Istanbul

And in Sinop, along Turkey’s Black Sea coast, the ravioli are likewise bigger, with soft, delicate skins, and they’re...

Traveling to Delhi? The local food scene can be pretty overwhelming there: What’s safe to eat? Where should I go? Why am I lost (again) in the congested backstreets of Old Delhi?? We’ve been there, done that, and put together this, our third destination guide on Kindle, just for you.

The Delhi Food & Travel Guide includes 43 quintessential dishes and drinks from the Indian capital, and tells you exactly where to find them. It also includes a bonus restaurant guide and Agra food guide, for Taj Mahal visitors. Like our existing Amsterdam and London guides, it’s conveniently downloadable to your Kindle, smartphone, or tablet for just $3.99.

Check it out on Amazon!

About the Delhi...

View of Avignon's famous broken bridge and Villeneuve-lès-Avignon beyond.
All photos by Naomi Bishop

Avignon is the sweetheart town of the Provence region of France, its historic buildings and papal mansions held fast within the 14th-century ramparts. Local cuisine is, like elsewhere in France, a product of the terroir: Beyond the old city walls, the region’s Mediterranean climate lends warmth, sunshine, and just a little rain—idyllic conditions for vegetable growing—while the proximity of the Med to the south offers dream-worthy seafood spreads. Cultural influences from Spain to the west and the rest of France to the north mean that the superior ingredients are put to creative...

What is American cuisine—and is it as bad as foreign menus would have us believe?

You’re at your family BBQ for the 4th of July. What’s on the menu? Why, hot dogs and hamburgers, of course! Classic Americana summer fare, complemented perhaps by some chicken wings, mayo-based salads, and corn on the cob. Some of the very same stuff that has come to represent, in many ways, “American food,” at least as distilled down on menus around the world, from Colombia to India. And while I would chow down on those burgers and dawgs with the best of them at said BBQ, this makes me, as an American, kind of sad.

America, we can do better than that!

Actually, America does do better than that,...

Felisa Rogers drove from Oregon to Oaxaca (and back) this winter in search of the perfect down-and-dirty, no-nonsense torta. Here are a few of her favorites.

A torta in Mexico City

The delights of driving the length of Mexico are manifold, but in my world, the taco and the torta reign supreme. On a recent 6,500-mile odyssey to Mexico and back, an unspoken mission developed: I’d find the best tortas, from the best hole-in-the-wall torterias.

Many classy restaurants in Mexico serve tortas, or sandwiches, but I see no reason to order a torta at a nice restaurant. The primary point is the price—typically, any establishment in Mexico that calls itself a restaurant is going to...

The perfect hotel view, in Sinop

Jutting out into the Black Sea on Turkey’s north coast, pretty Sinop is a water-lover’s retreat with its expansive sea views and picturesque harbor, bobbing with boats. It’s a gem along this stretch of coast, its idyllic setting boasting a small-town yet cosmopolitan atmosphere and, beyond that, a whole lot of living history: Walk the crumbling city walls, dating to around 72 BC, for some of the best views in town; poke around the active harbor for a taste of what the city’s trading-port past might’ve been like, millennia ago. But there’s another reason to make the trip up here: the food. Fishmongers abound, and their freshly caught wares spill out...

Nathan, pictured in 2bar Spirits’ tasting room next to a photo of his grandfather holding his father at 2Bar ranch. Photo by Naomi Bishop

“We are exceptionally fortunate to be located in Seattle—this city celebrates diversity and locally sourced products.”—Nathan Kaiser, owner-operator of 2bar Spirits

Tell us about what you do.
I am the owner-operator of Seattle’s 2bar Spirits, a craft distillery that’s entirely handmade from 100% locally grown grain. 2bar embodies “from grain to glass.” Whole grains arrive from local farmers, and we take those grains and make spirits entirely on site at our SODO location. We make 2bar Vodka, which is a wheat-based vodka, and 2bar Moonshine, a...

The spread at Seng Cheong [All photos by Juliana Loh].

In this guest post, Juliana Loh relays her itinerary for taking “heavyweight food friends from Hong Kong” out to eat in Macau for exactly 12 hours. Because it was during the Chinese New Year holidays, some of her favorite spots were closed, but she came up with great alternatives as needed—all listed here, should you ever have a 12-hour layover in Macau.

Pork chop buns at Tai Lei Loi Kei (called “Da Li Lai” in Mandarin)
In Taipa—the smaller of Macau’s two islands—this place is an institution. It used to have an outdoor eating area where people sit to eat pork chop buns, slurp noodles, and nibble on their curry fishball...

When we visited Antigua this winter, it was with the intention of relaxing on the beach, not driving all over the island hunting for local food. Well, relax on the beach we did, but with a rental car and an unwillingness to eat overpriced Italian food every night, we couldn’t help but give a local-food search our best shot. We had only a handful of days on the island—and quickly learned we had to dig a little to find the local stuff—but it was plenty of time to produce a good EYW snapshot of eight genuinely delicious Antiguan dishes and drinks. Check it out here.

As for the island itself—it’s too pretty not to share a few beauty shots, from harbor overlooks and roadside fruit...

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...

Photo by Naomi Bishop.

While most American families got up early on Easter morning to hunt about their lawns for eggs, my friend (and partner-in-foraging) Leslie, trusty canine companion Roger, and I were combing Grayland beach, on the southwest Washington coast, for razor clams (OK, Roger mostly just ran in circles). There were no bunnies or pastel plastic eggs to be found on this shoreline, just a rainbow of gray, with little definition between the muted-steel sky and the faint slate of the ocean. My eyes were trained on the muddy taupe of the sand most of the day, scanning for “tells,” the tiny, dime-size indents that indicate a clam lurking just below the surface.

It was late...

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 $3.99.

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...

When in Paris as a visitor, the history and atmosphere of a restaurant—just how Parisian it is—matters a lot. It informs our dining experience, it satisfies our expectations, it reminds us that we’re in Paris! In this guest post, Doni Belau of Girls’ Guide to Paris suggests six brasseries that bring the goods in an authentic way.

             Aux Lyonnais. Photo: Pierre Monetta

There’s nothing quite like your first night in Paris. Ideally it’s spent at one of the city’s historic bistros or brasseries, the kind that make you feel you’ve really arrived in the French capital. But nowadays, so many restaurants are owned by large restaurant groups or are so chock-full of tourists...

*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...

For this guest post, Tim and Nat Harris of food and travel blog A Cook Not Mad share with us the recipe for caillette (“ky-YET”), a pork-and-greens meatball dish from south-central France that dates to the 16th century.

The first time we visited Les Vans, a small town in the Ardèche department of France, we fell in love with it. It was quaint, and because it was 15 years ago and during the off-season, we shared the village with only its 2,660 inhabitants. We had rented an apartment from a family friend for a month and spent our time exploring the nearby mountains and villages extensively, foraging for wild mushrooms and chestnuts, making soups and confiture. 

The couple who...

Five of our favorite spots for poke on Hawaii and Oahu.


Ahi limu poke from Tamashiro Market, Honolulu.

Its time zone might be a few hours behind, but Hawaii is way ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to raw fish. While it took most of America well into the 1990s to be swept into the sushi craze, Hawaii has long loved the simple seafood salad called poke. It’s a fixture of every Hawaiian restaurant menu, takeout deli, and grocery store; even the local Costco keeps a well-stocked high-quality selection.

The word itself means “to cut,” and cut it has been: In all the multitude of poke variations, the components are chopped into bite-size pieces. Freshly caught local...

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...

The maguey plant can get you drunk three different ways and it’s not your college boyfriend — moreover, maguey (or agave) is used to actually treat syphilis, not cause it. A look at the humble maguey’s role in Aztec and Mexican life, past and present.

Photo: Naamsvermelding vereist/Wikipedia

The maguey cactus, native to Mexico, is best known for its place in alcohol, specifically tequila, but it’s also eaten in a variety of ways, used to make fabric and clothes, and taken for medicinal purposes. Not a looker, this giant, spike-covered plant somehow made its way from desert cactus to unexpected star of ancient Aztec (and later Mexican) civilization, permeating food, drink,...

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...

In New Zealand, meat pies are an iconic snack, certainly a must-eat for visitors and, it seems, an important part of any college student’s diet. Guest writer Noella Schink, who did her own research while studying abroad, shares her five favorite pie shops in Auckland. 

Photo: Wesley Fryer/Flickr

During college, I took a semester abroad in Auckland, New Zealand. Now, there were many memorable aspects of those six months, but what stayed with me the most were the meat pies. I mean, they literally stayed with me. Around my waistline. I couldn’t help it; they were so delicious. Some days I’d have two! Here is a rundown of the best spots to taste these devilish pastries when you...

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 Istanbul's 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...

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...

Until Eat Your World can travel to Peru to really delve into the country’s incredible cuisine, we’ve relied on the excellent uploads of our users and now, this guest post from Willa Ahlschwede, spotlighting five favorite frequently encountered dishes.

Ceviche mixto. Photo: EYW user Jessie

Peruvians love to talk about their favorite foods, reminiscing about a home-cooked birthday feast or a strange dish enjoyed on a school trip years ago. The country encompasses a surprising variety of climates, from the Amazon jungle to the Andes mountains, and any resident will rattle off with gusto the typical dishes from his or her region. Though today many platos tipicos can be enjoyed all...

My introduction to Portuguese cataplana stew couldn’t have been in a more traditional and idyllic setting. Facing the coast on the Algarve, in southern Portugal, in great company and the light of a beautiful sunset, I sat awaiting a dish I’d seen on almost every blackboard menu during my time in this region. Having been assured of the freshest, tastiest ingredients by the enthusiastic waiters, my expectations were high for this local dish. My group of four opted to share two large cataplanas so we could try both the meat and seafood variations.

The Algarve, where cataplana is most popular. Photo: Alexandra Jackson

While we sipped red wine and picked at a basket of bread and warm...

“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...

In this guest post, Sukanya of the food and travel blog Saffronstreaks shares with us the recipe for a favorite Bengali milk-based sweet from Kolkata (Calcutta): aam sandesh, or Indian fudge infused with mango. Of course, this “fudge” is not made with chocolate but with cottage-cheese-like chhana (also spelled chenna); the translation stems more from the dish’s texture. For more on milk-based treats from India, check out our Delhi sweets section.

Bengalis’ love for sweets is a well-known affair, and sandesh (“fudge”) is one they particularly adore. The great Bengali luncheon always ends on a sweet note,
and it doesn’t stop there; it continues with late-afternoon tea and dinner as...

Everywhere I turned in Dakar, there was something colorful (albeit often covered in dust) to admire: Art, like crunchy baguettes and good music, seems to be everywhere in Senegal's capital city. Some of it we purchased and brought home with us, but most of it we had to be content with photographing. Here are a few shots of Dakarois art.

A quick sketch maybe, but this wall was part of Village des Artes, a peaceful yet abundant artist community that is a must-visit.

I saw this image often, but here on this turquoise wall in the Ouakam neighborhood, it was most vibrant and beautiful.

Another beautiful painting from the Village des Artes. This African woman's profile...

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...

A few months ago, we published a Q&A with a saunier, or sea salt harvester, from Île de Ré, a small island off the west coast of France. In it, our subject mentions two can’t-miss dishes from the island, both of which make good use of its famous salt: sea bass baked in a salt crust and fava beans à la croque en sel. EYW contributor Cristina Sciarra, who’s just returned from the area—see our new Charente-Maritime food section—notes that these dishes are not as commonly offered in restaurants as prepared at home. Here she tells us how to make them. 

Sea bass baked in a salt crust

Buying (and cooking) whole fish is not only more economical than buying filets, but it’s also a lot...

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—high in sodium, MSG, and hydrogenated fats—are ubiquitous in West African cooking. Find out what the dangers are, then meet ogeri and sounbareh, the nutritious traditional seasonings they’re replacing.

Groundnut soup, Sierra Leone. How many Maggi cubes are in this? 

At a beautiful eco-resort on Sierra Leone’s Freetown Peninsula in 2012, 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 seasoning cubes. 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...

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...

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...

What to do if you’re traveling long-term and cannot stop thinking about your favorite comfort foods from home? You find local substitutes to quell the craving, as LandingStanding’s Meg Rulli explains in this guest post. 

Dulce de leche ice cream in Argentina

My husband, Tony, and I completely adore food. We are more inclined to spend 30 euros on an exquisite local meal than in a random boring museum. For us, learning about the culinary traditions of a place is one of the best activities you can do to learn about the culture of a country.

As much as we love eating our way around the world, though, we still miss certain comfort foods and staples from home (Florida, in our...

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 BagelRead More

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. 

The best way to discover the secrets of regional cuisine is in a local’s home, where it’s not always accessible to the average traveler. In Italy, however, there’s a shortcut to the dinner table, as freelance writer Jessica Spiegel explains in this guest post.

Central Milan

Back-tracking yet again through the narrow, dark streets behind one of central Milan’s many churches, scanning names on doorbells, we were glad we had arrived with time to spare before our appointment. We were both a bit nervous, not knowing what to expect or who else would be there when we finally found the right building, but no matter what else happened we were about to ring a stranger’s doorbell and...

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...

After a full day village-hopping along the Freetown Peninsula’s beautiful coastline, we hit our last stop, Bureh beach. We didn’t plan on saving the best for last; it just happened. On this idyllic stretch of palm tree-studded sand—with a river flowing directly through it, emptying into the sea—not another soul was in sight. Laura, Mark, and I jumped into the warm waves and washed off the dirt and sweat from the day’s journey. It was just us three; our guide for the day, Daniel; and a Bureh local named Tom, who found us within seconds of our arrival.  

Tom, clearly the town proprietor of goods of all kind, shot off a verbal menu of local fish, oysters, art, and illegal substances...

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...

“French people believe very strongly in the idea of terroir: We believe in locally made products, especially those that have a strong sense of identity and heritage. If I do my part and make my salt with as much respect as possible, then I’ve done my job.” —Hervé Rocheteau, Île de Ré, a small island off the western coast of France (pictured)

Tell us about your job.
I am a salt maker: My job is to manage a series of salt evaporation ponds, also known as salterns or salt pans. I feed saltwater from the ocean into different ponds very slowly; then the sun and the wind evaporate the water. Finally, the salt concentration becomes so high that it crystallizes, and results in sea salt....

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...

Before I met my French boyfriend and his family, my culinary repertoire was sadly devoid of small sea creatures. Sure, I might occasionally have ordered mussels when out to dinner, but let’s face it—those mussels tasted only of what they were sauced with. I had never tried a clam or oyster, nor did I particularly care to. Scallops made me cringe. I was also fairly certain that sardines and anchovies were probably the
same thing.

But my shellfish ignorance was not to last. When I moved to Paris three years ago, my boyfriend and I started making regular excursions to his familial home in Angoulins sur Mer, a fishing village nestled into the western coast of France, famous for its...

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...

Ever consider traveling to Sierra Leone? Maybe you should.

View of lagoon from bungalow, Tribewanted, John Obey beach

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?

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...

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...

What happens when Team EYW shows up to a fancy eco-lodge with the best restaurant in Senegal? They wind up eating at the bar man’s house.

Every friend of ours who has been to Senegal recommended we go to a hotel and restaurant in the Sine Saloum region called Lodge des Collines de Niassam. Besides having beautiful eco-friendly bungalows built into baobab trees and overlooking a bird-filled lagoon, the property is notorious for having the best French-inspired fare in the country. It was a big splurge for us, especially after three weeks of pricier-than-anticipated travel around West Africa, but we decided to go nonetheless, calling it an early seven-year wedding anniversary...

“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 in...

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...

A few summers ago, I conducted my graduate-school research at a health clinic in a batey, or rural community, about an hour north of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Punta Cana’s high-end resorts and all-you-can-eat buffets are a stark contrast to the impoverished former sugarcane plantations that make up the bateys in the island’s interior. Electricity is rare and subject to apagaones (blackouts) that can last an entire day, which has serious consequences for rural health clinics trying to operate blood labs and store vaccines—and severely limits the menu dished up for clinic staff.

During my 10-week stay, I slept on the floor of an empty clinic room with a handful of...

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...

I remember the days of always having one camera, two lenses, and a flash with me on my travels. That’s all changed with the iPhone. Last October I (finally) bought one, and happily tossed my old Samsung that could hardly connect to the internet into my ATC (antiquated technology drawer). I quickly fell in love with the portability and playfulness of my new phone’s 8-megapixel camera and actually became stressed about traveling with it. Would I still use my Canon 5D? Would I learn to rotate? Would I have to take pictures of everything with two cameras?

My first trip dealing with this dilemma came a month later, when Eat Your World headed to Amsterdam with some friends. My immediate...

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....

It was 1997 the last time I was on the Charles Bridge in Prague. I was a college student backpacking through Europe, and this moment of Dixieland jazz in the heart of Europe, pictured above, hit me strongly. I wasn't much of a photographer back then, but this is one of the few photos during that trip that actually told a good story and made me proud. When I started shooting professionally, I took the photo out, scanned it, and had the smudged, fingerprinted, black-and-white 4x6 sitting on my desk for years. When we produced a Prague section on this site, I knew I wanted it to be a header.

Fast forward to October of this year: I'm back on the Charles Bridge. The same Dixieland...

“I like to irrigate and cultivate. I like to farm. It’s like painting a picture: With a swipe of a brush you change the whole picture.” –Shane Milberger, owner of Milberger Farms, a chile pepper and vegetable farm with a roadside deli and produce stand

Tell us about your job.
I have 300 acres; of that, 40 acres are chile. We grow mild Anaheim, hot Anaheim, extra hot, Fresno, and the Mira Sol, also known as the Pueblo chile pepper.

This time of year [September] we’re packing chile, we’re harvesting. So I start the mornings off by going out to the shed and making sure everything’s ready to go, the guys are ready to pack, we go over what we’re packing and check what supplies they...

It’s hard to find a restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado, that doesn’t serve green chiles. This is prime pepper country, a smaller—and, some would argue, tastier—alternative to Hatch, New Mexico.

In autumn, at harvest time, the scent of roasting chiles wafts from roadside stands, supermarkets, and the annual Chile & Frijoles Festival, which I was lucky enough to catch this September. (Among pepper enthusiasts, the preferred spelling of the capsicum fruit is chile. The dish containing meat, chile, and vegetables, like the one we tried in Denver, is chili.)

The chiles are roasted over an open flame in rotating black-wire drums, and then hosed down in a cloud of steam. It’s hypnotizing...

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 New Delhi, tired but hungry and eager to get...

When I was asked to meet up with some clients in Detroit, I had a feeling a weekend of EYW coverage would lead to some very good things. It was just a few years ago that I had quickly visited Greektown and experienced the famous "flaming cheese." I knew there had to be much more than that, and was determined to convince Laura to make it a serious destination for us. With some trepidation, she began to research Detroit's foods, and slowly a list of musts became apparent that sold us both to the idea.

When you mention Detroit to anyone, you get a "why would you want to go there?" look immediately. The city has clearly lost its luster over the last god-knows-how-many years, and...

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...

 Each autumn, Cape Cod is a fabulous place to witness a colorful cranberry harvest.

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....

It was such a relief last week to find out the local Queens farmers market has been changed to year round. With only a week left to Thanksgiving, we usually are stocking up on the turkey meat and sausage that we will freeze and use throughout the winter. We have previously made good use of that system, but not getting seasonal vegetables has been the hard part. “Do we really have to go to Trade Fair [our overcrowded supermarket] for produce?” This is a common question we repeat throughout the cold months. “I miss the farmers market,” with a sad face, is another generic overused statement during the dark days of January and February.

We have become so accustomed to our Sunday walk...

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...