05 — Roam Editorial
Three Whole Goats Before Lunch
Food is the last honest travel genre — no one can fake a bite. Mark Wiens and Best Ever Food Review Show spent the month proving it, from a 35-year-old Arab restaurant in Bangkok to Japan's war on the American sandwich.
Mark Wiens uploaded this morning. By the time you read this, a few hundred thousand people will have watched him inside a 35-year-old Arab restaurant in Bangkok where the house special is mandi made with three whole goats. Wiens has been publishing at this cadence for over a decade — his Egypt street-food documentary did 1.6 million views, his India tour 7.8 million — and the format has barely changed, because it doesn't need to: go where the food is, eat everything, mean it.
The genre's other pole is Sonny Side of Best Ever Food Review Show, whose month included becoming a monk, surviving Bhutan, and a running series on what Japan is doing to American food — sandwiches this week, breakfast before that, two and three million views at a time. 'As a food journalist, I'm going undercover, trying them all and giving you the unfiltered truth,' he deadpans over a ten-egg sandwich in Osaka.
Japan spent centuries perfecting its own food. But then they set their sights on ours.
— Sonny Side, Best Ever Food Review Show
Why food keeps winning the algorithm: it's the one travel format where the viewer's imagination does the traveling. You can't taste the mandi. But you know exactly what it would mean to.