It was during Thanksgiving Day weekend when I was in third grade that I was staying with an uncle and aunt who took me and their daughters/my cousins for my first Chinese restaurant experience. The whole of my order I don't recall; but I do remember being kind of grossed out by egg drop soup, thinking at the time that it smelled like urine (it's fine by me now, nor do I think it smells nor looks like pee). Do you recall your first time eating at a restaurant specializing in food outside your national/ethnic heritage?

Fast forward to my college years, when I was hanging out late one morning with a friend in whose steps I was kind of following as a music journalist and critic. For lunch, he had led us to his city's first Indian restaurant. This was the mid-1980's, and in a town where Mexican food was seen as exotic by many only a few years prior. Now this same city has multiple Indian eateries for both omnivores and vegetarians. Have you ever eaten in the first restaurant serving a kind of cuisine for which it was the only place to get it in the city you ate it, with that food now being much more widespread?

The year after my first East Indian restaurant fare, I was walking in the neighborhood of the college friend at whose summer residence I was spending a couple of days, getting hungry, spied a Middle Eastern (Lebanese, specifically, if memory serves), walked in without any previous familiarity with that kind of food, ordered a vegetarian sampler plate and some rosewater lemonade--maybe some Turkish coffee, too, but I definitely recall the lemonade!--and enjoyed. This may have also been the first time I purposefully ordered a non-animal protein meal as well. I'd call this experience the turning of the corner for me in so far as becoming whatever degree of foodie I am today. Would you call yourself a foodie?

Nowadays, while driving around a city bigger than the one where i live, I try to take note of restaurants serving ethnicities of food (if that's an apt way to put it?); and if they're in the city where I website to which I contribute is based, I pitch coverage of them to my editor at the site. Whether you write about food yourself--and maybe you do while journaling for a forum such as Yelp--are you on at least an intermittent quest for new places to eat dishes you've not yet tried?