EYW Blog

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....

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!  

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Point Pleasant boardwalk in winter, circa 1998

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

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

Pizza rossa

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

Vietnamese pizza

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

Pizza margherita, Roman style

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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 “

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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