Ling Ma loves EatingInTranslation.com

By Ling Ma
Published: February 15th, 2008 | 12:00am

This ongoing chronicle of blogger Dave Cook's visits to restaurants, street stands, and markets scales food appreciation back just a bit. On EatingInTranslation.com, first impressions count, and dishes are sized up quickly and unpretentiously.

By his own count, Cook's eaten at more than 1,800 establishments, most of which are located in the New York and New England area, but they’re not limited to lesser-known locales such as Guangzhou, China. He eats everything, from the usual New York pizza slice to the street-stand balut (a duck egg that's uncomfortably closer to duck than egg). The pizza in question gets the throwaway treatment ("would have been improved by a more thorough tomato wetdown"), but the balut fares a bit better ("Imagine a liver custard").

Instead of ponying up for another $20 entree amped up by another food critic, sometimes it's nice to be reminded that you can still eat well and creatively, with just a public transit card and a coupla bucks in your wallet.

Ling Ma is Venus Zine’s Reads editor.