An Introduction
People like food. They eat it all the time and supposedly it’s really important too. It’s like breathing or moving or pooping, but way tastier. Now where do I stand on the matter? I love it. More than most people in the world. I’m the guy who likes tagging along on ski trips so that he can put a pork fat marinara sauce on the stove, simmer it for 24 hours, then serve it to my sunburned, unshaven and drunken friends as they amble in from a hard day at the slopes. So am I obsessive and idiotic about food? Probably (yes). But food is fucking delicious and last time I checked, there’s still plenty of space left on the internet.
And now a little bit about me. I grew up in Santa Monica, went to college in Los Angeles and moved to New York a little while ago. Then a girl happened, I moved back to LA and here I am, back on the west side. I also haven’t worked in about six months. It started as a vacation, but now I think it’s called being unemployed. Let’s just say Craigslist and I aren’t getting along very well. But hey, we’re in a recession right? I’m lucky enough to have a couple of fistfuls of cash left in the old bank account and it’s time to do something exciting with all that free time I’ve got.
But how do I pick what and where I’m going to eat? Well, I’m striving for authenticity. I want the taste in my mouth to be as close to the homeland as I can get it. Sometimes I’ll have personal reasons for picking one place over another. But in the end, this is going to be about trying to learn about other cultures through their food—and maybe, as Cesar Millan would put it, learning something about myself as I go along too.
So here we go. I’m probably going to lose every last dollar I have on this foolishly ambitious project, but if I’m gonna go down in flames, eating a hell of a lot of good food seems like a damn fine way to do it.
