Our Year in Food: 2017

It's been a (very long) while since we've posted anything here, but it's been an incredibly hectic few months. One major reason why is that we're preparing to move for the first time in 12 years and doing all sorts of related stuff, like planning out our own kitchen. (Super exciting!) Also, as we prepare to move, we've been trying to eat stuff from our overstuffed (and sometimes expired) pantry, so not as many new cooking projects. (I also abandoned the 52 week cooking challenge, despite being a completionist, something I'll explain in a separate post.)

It's somewhat unbelievable to us that we're already at the end of December and the end of 2017, as the time has just flown by, especially ever since we've started working on our move. We have lots of WorldEats recaps to catch up on and other stuff that we want to write, but here's our quick year-end summary for 2017:

The first restaurant meal we ate in 2017: Family dinner at Park Asia in Brooklyn. We got together to wish my grandparents well on their upcoming trip and also celebrate my cousins' birthdays, and it was nice to start off the new year with family.

The first home-cooked meal we ate in 2017: Daikon miso soup plus stir-fried Korean chicken sausage (sadly discontinued this year at Trader Joe's) and mixed vegetables over rice.

The last restaurant meal we ate in 2017: Family dinner at Affable Eatery (FKA New Spring Garden) in Brooklyn, for pretty much the same reasons as the first restaurant meal of the year. Getting together with the extended family was a nice way to close out the year, and we hadn't even realized until now that we basically bookended the year with family dinners.


The last home-cooked meal we ate in 2017: A Greek feast prepared by A as his traditional year-end cooking project. A whole fish, lemon potatoes, spanakorizo, with an appetizer round of skordalia, tzatziki, and pita - it was an ambitious plan but it all got done and got done deliciously.

# of different restaurants we tried in 2017 (together and separate): 291, which is more than any other year since we started counting back in 2012. We must have done more food crawls or something, because we certainly didn't eat out almost every night.

Places explored (outside the NYC metro area): Buffalo, NY; Corning, NY; Dansville, NY; El Segundo, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Palm Springs, CA; Pasadena, CA; Redondo Beach, CA; Richmond, BC; Seattle, WA; Thousand Oaks, CA; Torrance, CA; Vancouver, BC; Venice, CA.

Most visited restaurant of 2017 (together): Tie between Los Tacos No. 1 (the new one that opened near Times Square over the summer) and Mang Tang Hung, a Chinese restaurant we visited for multiple family dinners. I had expected tacos to be the winner, not a tie, but that's what the numbers said.

Favorite food memories of 2017: Not yet done, but will add the links here once we've posted them!

Progress on WorldEats challenge: 58/196 have been posted about, but we've been to many, many more that we need to recap.

Favorite overall meal of 2017: Our dinner at Guu with Garlic in Vancouver. We had spent our only clear and sunny day in British Columbia running through the trees and walking over the suspension bridge at Capilano and then strolling around gorgeous Stanley Park, and we were so hungry by the time we walked through the door of this cozy izakaya. We ordered so many things, and every single one was delicious. What a great meal.

Looking forward to more adventures in 2018!