International Eats

One month out of the US, ten days in Thailand, the rest of the time in the Motherland of China. One fantastic, much-needed vacation, a once-in-a-lifetime culinary adventure. One month of restaurants whose names I can’t pronounce, never mind spell or write. Ten days with Yash’s high-tech camera that I don’t know how to use but with a lens so powerful you can see the sharp outlines of the whiskers on a mouse’s face. Hopefully, there will be no mouse whiskers to photograph in any restaurants we go to as I’ve never seen mouse whiskers without the rest of the mouse, and that would be a horror unsuited for any culinary journey on which I will embark. The problem is, all this culminates, all these numbers – one month, ten days, dozens of restaurants, all these add up to one thing: one neglected food blog. The one and only creation by Foodie Houser, MD that would suffer at least a month with no doctoring. And we all know everyone deserves access to care. Even acerbic, arrogant, often belligerent, and sometimes downright tear-sucking bashes that I call food critic license deserves a loophole to get at least a few follow-ups…

I pondered this, and somewhere during a numbing nine-hour exam, followed by a four-hour bus ride turned six, not counting the two-hour delay, an epic journey of NYC/NJ transit on a sleepless night, complete with 45-minute transfers that landed us, finally, in a shore mecca of liberation at Newark Liberty Airport, the idea came to me. My mind was fuzzy, more like dead as a doornail, but between the 4-hour napping coma status post the worst 24-hour call I’ve ever pulled, all these numbers also added up to a single idea. You may find my arithmetic here to be poetically pleasing, however, I would abstain from entrusting me with your money-managing based on this kind of math.

My one idea stems from realizing just how much food I will try and just how little you will see if I don’t document it. Food is, after all, the reason we live. It is the reason we work, the reason we sweat. It is how we express our differences and defines our identities when we are all the same. The foods I will document on my first of many gastronomic global domination tours will be foods you don’t see, foods you can’t see, and maybe some foods you don’t want to see. But there will be food this month, and my creative juices will not run drier than the Silk Road sand. And one day, I will eat that too. So on that day and on these days too, you will taste the earth with me, one bite-sized city at a time.