Chi Tung will be writing a biweekly column from Shanghai, China.
Find out more about Chi on our About page and watch for his first post this Thursday!

Being a proper eater means yielding to the gut. I don’t mean gut in the purely physical sense, though it’s no coincidence that some of the finest chefs pack [...]

A diamond is, on its face, just a rock. Of course, it is a very hard rock, but it’s essentially a solid mass of carbon (also the main ingredient of graphite, the mineral used to make pencil tips). After the rock is cut, it becomes another story completely. The gem is judged by the four [...]

It’s a given that the indicators of a good restaurant (or dining counter, cafeteria or street cart, for that matter) depend greatly on the person pointing them out. One man’s Michelin star is another’s Burger King crown, and while a thousand Yelp reviews can’t be wrong, they probably are when it comes to weighting atmosphere.
When [...]

I am sick of sushi.
So is my body, or so I can assume. My girlfriend Mele returned from a routine check-up at the doctor with the stern warning, “Stay off the mercury for awhile,” and neither of us was surprised. As part-time pescatarians in the summer, we’d been craving lighter, cooler dinners. Sushi is a [...]

As previously touched upon, the center of Palma is with few exceptions a maze of streets that the average American would find difficult to sort out. During the first days after my move there the old city seemed very large to me. At first I stuck to the area immediate to the alley on which [...]

“You’re not very impressive.” A pause punctuated this matter of fact as Joon stumbled into the rest of his thought.
“…But you’re good just to have around, you know?”
I don’t know if I knew or if I’ve ever really known, but being the kind of guy who tends to practice honesty to a fault and awkwardness [...]

I have a severe weakness for Japanese curry. It’s the psychological equivalent of meatloaf for me. My mom used to make the gravy-like concoction from Vermont Curry mix, whose box boasts that there are hints of apples and honey in its honey-brown oily blocks of packed curry powder.
My mom would dissolve the blocks, add chopped [...]

Not long after I’d begun teaching in Majorca a student asked me if it were true that people eat lots of “trash food” (“fast food” or “junk food” rendered in his particular Spanglish) in America. The question got my attention – not just because of his mistake, but because I’d never thought about it while [...]

Comrades,
I’m in a bit of a transition period right now, wrapping up work at one job, training for new responsibilities at another and suffering from a mysteriously potent and lingering amount of residual stress that has stopped me from tending to my writing duties. I hope to be back up to speed with a weekly [...]

Some of my relatives from Chicago were in LA recently, and we conducted our usual what-kind-of-person-are-you-now-that-you’re-a-year-older discussions. My uncle, admirably a fan of food, decided that the 405 freeway would be a whole lot more interesting if we discussed our favorite dishes, so we took turns naming aloud our favorite Italian food, Chinese food, etc.
If [...]