Road Food

Over the past several years, I’ve been kindasorta moving all over the country. I spent most of my life in California, but ran off to New Jersey for grad school, then to West Virginia for med school, Kentucky for some of my rotations…so I was kindasorta following a westward trajectory back home!

…However, it got derailed because I got wooed by the residency program where I did my grad school program. I’m still planning/hoping to eventually make it back out to California (or the west coast…or Hawai’i)…

Road Food, 10th Edition: An Eater’s Guide to More Than 1,000 of the Best Local Hot Spots and Hidden Gems Across America

By Jane & Michael Stern

After I graduate from my residency program, I want my next move to either be to wherever the hecks it is that I’ll hopefully be doing my sports medicine fellowship…or on a cross-country food tour back to California, and this book is definitely going to have to come with me for the ride!

Road Food contains 1000 different restaurants that are divided up by location! They starred a “top 100” out of those 1000 as part of an honor roll for their extra-special picks though!

• New England (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont)
• Mid Atlantic (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, DC)
• Mid-South (Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia)
• Deep South (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina)
• Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin)
• Southwest (Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Nevada, Utah, Colorado)
• Great Plains (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska)
• West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington)

Hawai’i is not included (:[), but you can’t exactly drive there, so it makes sense for this book! If you want to check out some good eats there, check out my food tour of Waikiki!

I really like how thoughtful the book is in choosing these restaurants! Most of them don’t require a reservation, but they do note which ones get super-crowded so you can plan accordingly if you want to go there! They also have a dollar sign approach to how expensive you can expect your meal to be:

• $: full meal < $15
• $$: full meal between $15-30
• $$$: full meal over $30

Each restaurant mentioned comes with…the name of the restaurant, its website (if available), address, phone number, pricing (as above), “B, L, D” (for whether it contains breakfast, lunch or dinner), and when it might be closed or when the restaurant has limited hours (e.g. for winter). There are also icons on some of them depicting waterfront dining, mountain/ocean views, a local favorite, open early/late/always/weekend only, vegan/vegetarian-friendly, etc.!

The back of the book breaks down the restaurants by region/state in index form!

It just so happens that I’m running off to upstate New York later on to go to my friend’s engagement party–I’m hoping I’ll be able to check out some of these places on my way up (or down)!

• Which region would you most want to check out for fooding purposes!?
• What did you get on the summer roadtrip quiz? It told me to do Route 66 Chicago to Los Angeles!

Check out my other book reviews!