It is early autumn in 2026, and as I write this I am sitting at my home on the beach in Mati, Philippines. The water is not far away, the weather is warm, and I am sitting here thinking that I have been very lucky.

Now, after you have read a few chapters of this book, you may decide that “lucky” is not quite the right word.

You may lean more toward reckless.

Possibly insane.

I will allow you to make that decision for yourself.

What I can tell you is that somewhere along the way I fashioned a life that allowed me to experience a lot of the world. It certainly was not planned this way from the beginning. I did not sit down as a young man with a notebook and write, “One day I shall become a culinary consultant, work all over the world, live partly in Florida and partly on a beach in the Philippines, and accumulate enough strange stories to fill several books.”

Had I written that down, somebody probably should have taken the notebook away from me.

But here we are.

I am a culinary consultant, which is one of those job descriptions that sounds slightly more organized than the actual work tends to be. I become involved in hospitality projects in different parts of the world. Sometimes I help open something new. Sometimes I am brought in because something existing is not working very well. Sometimes the owner knows exactly what the problem is, and sometimes the owner is the problem, which can make the first meeting considerably more interesting.

For roughly the first forty years of my life, however, I was mostly a one-continent guy. I had traveled to Europe once as a teenager with a group of kids, but beyond that my world was largely North America. Then something changed. Work began taking me farther away, one project led to another, and eventually passports, airports, strange hotel rooms, unfamiliar foods, and people from cultures completely different from my own became normal parts of my life.