I’m proud to announce that I’m now halfway through my quest to eat food from 160 nations without leaving NYC. (Burp.) A few quick reflections on my journey so far: I’ve eaten herring four times, livestock hooves three times, pig tails once (boing!), and kangaroo once. I got drunk and pretended to be a barn […]

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I’m not usually a hateful guy, but I pretty much hate pigeons. When I lived in Chicago sometime last century, I spent an entire summer getting woken up every morning by a nest of pigeons on my tiny windowsill. That’s OK and everything, but the fatass pigeons had a massive nest that seemed to be […]

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As a longtime fan of hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants (a friendly reminder: if the term “hole-in-the-wall” gives you happy memories of toilet stalls in truck stop restrooms, you might need help), I always have low expectations of everything besides the food itself. If the tables are dirty, the menus are tattered, and the service is clunky, […]

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Conclusive proof that I’m a dork:  I stayed up until about 2:00 a.m. a few nights ago, trying to figure out whether Massawa, a popular “Ethiopian” restaurant near Columbia University, is owned by Ethiopians or Eritreans.  I’d been told by several Ethiopians and Eritreans (most notably by the owners of Dahlak, a desperately underrated Eritrean […]

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One of the unintended consequences of my little food project is that I’ve spent a lot of time face-to-face (or face-to-hoof, or face-to-pork-rind) with my food hang-ups. Every once in a while, I’m reminded of how the food culture works in Iowa, where I grew up. We were raised to believe that there are exactly […]

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