Chasing delicious (and unusual) food around the world as a job

For more than a decade, Kiwi couple Thomas and Sheena Southam have been chasing the world’s best food — not through fine-dining lists, but by following the locals.

Through their YouTube channel Chasing a Plate, the pair have built a following by immersing themselves in food cultures across the world.

The journey began in Melbourne, when Sheena — then a lawyer — was made redundant. New to the city and tired of endlessly applying for jobs, she started a food blog as a way to meet people.

In 2016, the couple took a bigger leap, putting everything on the line to travel for a year and document what they ate along the way.

“Was it the right decision at the time? Yeah, looking back [in hindsight], but it probably wasn't [at the time]. The numbers didn't say we should have kept going, but we did and we're still here,” Thomas told Summer Times.

From the outset, they say they chose to rely on advertising rather than restaurant sponsorships, allowing them to eat where they wanted and stay honest. The couple says critics accuse them of being too positive, but they say that’s because they intentionally only seek good food.

“If something's not great, we will stop filming. We'll just finish the meal. We'll put the camera away quietly and we just won't publish the content, because we're not here to bag on a small business and be negative. We want a positive outlook. We want people to enjoy amazing food," Thomas says.

They’ve also decided not to country-hop as a tick-box exercise. Instead, they focus on the quality of their trip. India alone has taken up more than six months across three trips; Mexico and Turkey, several months each.

That depth has led them to some dishes that may be unusual for Kiwis, including brains, insects and uterus tacos (which had a slight crunch and inner softness). In Malaysia, there was torpedo soup — made from “chewy” bull’s penis. In Turkey, breakfast once involved scooping brains from a roasted sheep’s skull.

“It was delicious," Sheena says. "Yeah, that was a really great meal," Thomas adds.

But there are some things Sheena draws a line on. For months, she’d been fixated on trying a bread bowl filled with goulash in Budapest and savoured it for the last day of that trip, until she found out it was kidney.

"Kidney is the one thing that I've tried so many times to like it, but I just don't. I don't like the texture. I don't like the taste. I've tried it in various forms and ways that it's been prepared and cooked. I just can't do it," she says.

"I was just so upset. I almost wanted to cry because I'd been fantasizing about this meal for months."

With about "a litre" of kidney goulash each, and keen to not waste food, she told Thomas he had to eat both.

"To top it off, as we started, the power went out," Thomas says. "So we sat there in the dark, eating these two massive bread bowls."

Their travels came to a halt when borders closed during the Covid-19 pandemic, forcing them home to Aotearoa. And despite all they’ve eaten around the world, the couple say New Zealand holds its ground.

“There's people doing such incredible things, be it producers, chefs, fishers, hunters, growers. I think more people need to realise that we are spoiled in New Zealand with incredible food."

Now, they're heading to Melbourne to grow their business but plan to be backwards and forwards across the ditch for some time to come.