Around the World

The original idea behind this food blog, and the impetus for us to start, came during the 2010 Men's World Cup. We had made the plan to attempt to eat at a restaurant in NYC representing every country participating in the tournament. It was a daunting task and one we knew that we had virtually no chance of completing, but it certainly gave us a reason to start chronicling our eating adventures. In the end, we were able to eat 17 out of the 32 countries.

As the World Cup ended, we realized that we couldn't just make this an every 4 years type of blog, that wouldn't work. We had always planned at some point to start an exploration of the world's food. After all, two things we both enjoy are eating and traveling. In the end we opted to try and eat food from a restaurant representing every country.

Originally, we were going to do this alphabetically by country. But, thinking about it further, it seemed like that could be difficult to do sometimes. Some restaurants specialize in regional cuisine or the cuisine of more than one neighboring country. Do we count that for country A or country B? Can we go there more than once if it's the only place? What if we get stuck on someplace like Kiribati or Nauru? (That could still happen with the way we're going to do it, but at least we get to face this all at once.) Doing a "walk" around the world seemed like a better idea.

So that's what we're going to do. A walk around the world. The only "rule" for a restaurant to qualify is that it has to be outside the country it represents. (For example, we went to a Cypriot place in Santorini, Greece, so that would count.) Old visits don't count. We have to go to each place at the time it comes up in our "walk." And we'll go to as many restaurants per country/region as it takes to explore the region, instead of just crossing it off our list. We're also not going to do this exclusively. We still plan to eat at all types of restaurants, just make a special effort once in a while to tackle this walk around the world. This could take us a very, very long time. We're ready.

We're going to start with our neighbors to the north - Canada. It's harder than you think trying to find Canadian places other than Tim Horton's (but we still may go for some timbits). Then we'll go through Central America, the Caribbean, South America, the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, Asia, Middle East, Europe and then, finally, Africa. We'll tag all the posts with WorldEats so join us in our journey!