A new website is helping recent arrivals discover international restaurants around Pittsburgh.
Anjie Cao, a student at Carnegie Mellon University from Beijing, is the creator of Eat the World!, “an international student’s guide to international restaurants in Pittsburgh.” The site organizes city restaurants on a map of the world. Cao has mapped it out by country and region, and in some cases, provincial cuisine.
There are three requirements for a restaurant to land on Cao's map: it has to be good, accessible, and affordable. As a student, access to the restaurants by bus is important, and so is the price point. No restaurant that has more than two dollar signs on a review site makes the map. (She notes that there are almost no Spanish or French restaurants on the map, because of their price points.) The “good” factor is based on Yelp reviews, though Cao will tell you if she’s disappointed.
Eat the World is a great place to go if you’re curious about an international cuisine but don’t know anything about it. With each restaurant, Cao gives a short analysis of the eatery. Sometimes she notes a favorite dish, like the stinky pot from Rose Tea Cafe in Oakland; on others, she simply says that they will “never let you down.” Cao will tell you if a cuisine has been Americanized or if it’s “kinda pricey.” She gets recommendations from her friends and often includes their thoughts as well.
Cao plans to keep updating the map as the food scene changes and will gladly take suggestions for additions.
https://eattheworldpgh.github.io/map/
