Travel (And Eat) The World Like Andrew Zimmern
You can already use Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods-inspired app to find out where he eats, but now, there's a new tool to stalk — er, we mean follow — our favorite foodie host.
Zimmern, now the ambassador for Trippy.com, is one of the many celebrities to get on board with Trippy.com, a travel planning web site that incorporates social media and guidebooks in a Pinterest-like board. (Chef Anthony Bourdain also frequents Trippy, alongside Rachel Zoe and Jason Mraz.) Zimmern said that as soon as he heard about Trippy in its alpha-testing stages, he wanted to get involved. "I thought it offered something special and unique," he said. "The user interface, where I can share both places that I've been and places I want to go, plus aggregate information from experts, it's just so cool."
The power of Trippy, he says, comes from the sheer transformative power of traveling: "By getting out of our own comfort zone, we're challenged in suble ways," he says. "Even if it's simply talking to a stranger, or making a friend on a bus in a country 10,000 miles away." So to find a web site that would let him "harness the power" of people's travels, while cataloging his own experiences, "was pretty cool."
Zimmern said he uses Trippy not only for personal travel, but also for upcoming shows (Bizarre Foods is gearing up for production again). He says it's where he gets his best tips. "Say you posted your Thai takeout from Astoria up on Trippy, and I saw that, I might go to that place, or remember that there's that Greek restaurant up on Steinway," he says. "If you post those neighborhood places, I might go."
With more than 2,600 followers and hundreds of pinned places, it's no wonder the world wants to know where Zimmern goes. After a look at his Trippy boards, we found his most pinned-board wasn't in a faraway place, but his hometown: Minneapolis. Zimmern shared with us his five favorite dishes from his pinned Minneapolis board:
• Grilled shrimp and beef roll-your-own spring rolls from Que Nha, a Vietnamese restaurant in St. Paul
• Salami e fungi pizza from Punch Pizza
• Pickled pig's foot and scrambled eggs with truffles from Piccolo Restaurant
• Fish torta from Tilia
• Green papaya salad with sticky rice from the Hmong Market in St. Paul