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Food That Carries More Than Just Flavor
There is a difference between eating food and understanding it. Most people spend their entire lives on the eating side of that line, which is completely understandable because good food is one of life's most immediate and accessible pleasures. But the moment you start asking why a dish exists, what history produced it, what ingredients were available and what circumstances shaped the way they were combined, the experience of eating that dish changes permanently. It becomes richer, more layered, and more connected to something larger than the meal itself.
That shift in perspective is what drives the entire journey behind this project, and it started with a simple conviction: you do not truly understand a cuisine until you have cooked it alongside the people who live it every day.
What Twenty Five Years of Cooking With Locals Actually Teaches You
The early ambition was to become a professional chef. Culinary school followed, but somewhere during that training a more important realization arrived. Professional cooking and genuine culinary understanding are related pursuits but they are not the same thing. The kitchen skills being developed were useful tools, but the understanding being sought required something that no professional kitchen could provide: time spent cooking in the places where these dishes actually belong, with the people who grew up eating them.
That realization changed the direction of everything that followed. Weekends, holidays, and any free time available began to fill with kitchen visits, market mornings, and conversations with local cooks willing to share what they knew. Each experience added something that could not have been learned any other way, a small detail, a technique passed down without being written anywhere, an ingredient used in a way that only made sense once you understood the context surrounding it.
From Fifty Cuisines to Nearly One Hundred
The original goal was straightforward: explore fifty cuisines with enough depth and honesty to genuinely understand what made each one distinct. That number was reached and left behind a long time ago. The journey is now approaching one hundred cuisines, and what has changed is not the ambition but the relationship with the project itself.
What began as a personal challenge with a clear finish line has become a permanent way of moving through the world. Every trip now naturally includes time in a local market or a home kitchen because that is simply where the most interesting and most honest things are always happening. The list has stopped feeling like a list and started feeling like a way of life.
The Professional Life That Runs Alongside the Journey
Outside of this project, the role of CEO of the Big Green Egg shapes a significant portion of each working week. The two worlds connect more naturally than they might appear to from the outside. A deep engagement with fire, cooking, and the cultural significance of food informs both pursuits in ways that are genuinely difficult to separate. Business travel that might otherwise pass without much food exploration consistently becomes an opportunity to find the local market, the neighborhood kitchen, or the roadside stall where something worth learning is happening.
Following the Journey Across Platforms
Everything produced through this project is connected by the same core belief: the table is where culture becomes most honest and most human, and the best way to understand any place is to cook what its people cook. That belief has now been tested across nearly one hundred cuisines and it has held up every single time.
The complete video journey, every cuisine explored and every kitchen visited, lives at Road to 50 Cuisines, where the cooking, the travel, and the people behind the food are documented with the same curiosity that started this whole project two and a half decades ago.
Behind the scenes moments, daily food discoveries, and real time coverage from every destination on the list including recent work on Taiwan street food are shared on Instagram for anyone who wants to follow along between the longer video pieces.
The journey has no finish line in sight, and that is exactly how it should be.