Asian Fortune Your source for all things Asian American
By Suchi Rudra
Strolling with her parents down the boardwalk in Atlantic City, 10-year-old Mary Kong-DeVito experienced her first love—food love, that is. After swallowing the first raw oyster of her life, Mary begged her father to order more, and eventually gulped down 2 or 3 dozen that afternoon.
“I think something clicked that day. All I’d ever eaten before that point was Chinese food at home and Chinese food when we went out,” Mary recalls.
Now, at the age of 37, Mary has come a long way from Cantonese cuisine and raw oysters to become one of DC’s most beloved food bloggers at GirlMeetsFood.com, writing humorously about eccentric eats and diverse cuisine about town, with an ongoing mission to inspire people to explore unfamiliar foods.
Although Mary grew up in the ethnically rich setting of New York City, the daughter of traditional Chinese parents longed for the cheeseburgers and candy that her American friends enjoyed. But being part of a Chinese family from the Guangzhou province—one that also owned a couple of traditional Cantonese restaurants in the Flushing district (now the city’s second China Town)—meant “old school peasant eating.”
“Ultimately,” Mary admits, “being Chinese American has put me in unique position to run my blog, because I’m a product of two very different cultures.”
When Mary left New York in 1996 to attend school in DC, she noticed there were only two types of places to eat out: steakhouse “power spots” catering to politicians and ethnic eateries located out in the suburbs—with nothing in between. Over a decade later, in 2009 when GirlMeetsFood was set up, Mary realized that the DC community’s taste in food was still “very conservative. And my motto is ‘I’d try anything at least once.’”
The foodie and blogger doesn’t mention this lightly. She’s swallowed down grasshoppers not once or twice, but three times by now—and in various forms: grasshopper guacamole, grasshopper tacos and a grasshopper cocktail with Mezcal and peanut syrup.
“It’s pretty rough. In Oaxaca, Mexico, it’s part of the diet, and apparently they have grasshoppers in everything,” Mary explains.
But grasshoppers aren’t so weird for an extreme foodie like Mary, who reveals that the strangest food she’s ever managed to keep down was a Filipino delicacy known as balut, which turns out to be (and looks exactly like) a fertilized duck embryo inside its eggshell.
However, Mary has made an effort to slightly tone down her foodie-gone-wild adventures after discovering this was alienating her audience.
“I used to think everyone’s tried what I’ve tried, but that’s not the case. I guess it has to do with having lived in New York. If I had this blog there, it wouldn’t be anything unusual.”
Strange or not, the blogger had been tasting her way through the city’s diversifying restaurant scene—especially improved, Mary says, in the last 5 years—but was biting off more than she could chew. Which is why the girl of GirlMeetsFood now employs 6 freelance food writers and 2 photographers to help her partake of the city’s ever-evolving cuisine and share their findings with the blog’s readers.
The foodie also used to eat out much more frequently, but in recent years has cut back to 2 or 3 times a week. When she does get to stay home and cook, Mary usually prepares very simple meals of steamed or roasted veggies and a protein to counter balance rich restaurant meals.
Simplicity is something that the blogger is also happy to embrace in the region’s return to small batch companies, whose products are made directly in family kitchens or on farms. Mary says she likes to support small farmers, including another ethnic group whose food is mostly unfamiliar to DC folks—the Amish community of nearby Pennsylvania. Mary notes, for example, that the Smucker family produces “some seriously delicious eggs and meats. Everything is very natural. And the Amish people don’t drink, so instead they make something called a fruit shrub by pickling fruit in vinegar and sugar, and then adding soda water for a refreshing drink. Or you can add vodka or gin for a great cocktail,” Mary adds with a laugh.
In addition to the blog, Mary still works as an on-call massage therapist (she once had Barbra Streisand as a client) and has recently partnered with 3 local bloggers, who are also her friends, to form the advertising network 4bitten Media. With food and business on her mind 24/7, it’s rare that Mary has the time to indulge in secret foodie luxuries like ordering a greasy pizza (only to be eaten on the couch or in a hotel bed when on vacation) or chicken nuggets “that no one wants to hear me blog about. Those chicken nuggets are delicious, even though I know they come from pink goo,” Mary admits with a chuckle. On a more serious note, she adds, “There wasn’t always fast food, but you’re still eating the same parts and you just don’t know it. It used to be that everyone farmed and you ate everything–you didn’t waste.”
Getting too serious and carried away, however, remains one of the occupational hazards of being a professional foodie.
“I went to an event serving a new kind of bottled water and the guy told me, ‘When we bottle the water in our factory, we play classical music to enhance the molecules.’ Are you kidding me?! That’s when you get a little carried away,” she acknowledges.
At GirlMeetsFood, Mary strives to keep the food snobbery at bay and remember the bigger picture.
“We don’t take ourselves too seriously. Food is a joyous subject, and no one should get upset when talking about food. Actually, it’s a privilege to talk about food like this, because there are a lot of people who don’t have the luxury of doing what we do. They just eat what they can.”
