Going somewhere and wish you could take all of a city’s Eat Your World info with you? With EYW’s Kindle and City Guides, you can! Don’t miss out on any local foods or drinks during your next trip.
Hey guys I am a traveler who loves to explore different places around the world. I often visit outside of Canada, So whenever I have to travel around the world I always book my flight tickets from the... Read more
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...
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 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.
“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.
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...
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...
“[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...
“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).
A tribute to New York City's culinary traditions, fine dining when it counts, and 10-plus years of loving food—and 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 wedding anniversary was definitely one of them. Tibetan momos, as much as we love them,...
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 Top Chef contestant Edward Lee’s two excellent restaurants—not to mention the requisite drive out in the country to...
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
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 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.)
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...
Scott and I have called various parts of NYC home for 14-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!
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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?...
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.”
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.
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...
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.
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...
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 fish and seafood like tako (octopus) and ahi tuna are chopped...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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...
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