When you’re married, your favorite TV shows generally become your wife’s favorite shows.
This is the unwritten deal so I can watch sports when needed.
With the exception of “supernatural” reps, this is generally fine. My wife and I usually like the same shows and, in many cases, YouTube videos.
One of the YouTubers I’m interested in is Mike Chen, who owns the Mikey Chen and Strictly Dumpling channels, the latter of which has 3.85 million subscribers.
The videos show Chen visiting restaurants around the world. It’s mostly Asian restaurants, but it goes to many grill, Mexican, and hamburger restaurants, as well as pretty much every other type of restaurant.
We’ve grown so big that I spent $ 100 on Mike last year delivering a cameo birthday greeting to my wife. This is the only time I’ve done that. I felt comfortable with Chen’s case because all of the money he makes from Cameo is donated to restaurant workers struggling during the pandemic.
Chen lived in Dallas, Texas, near my family.
On our recent trip to Dallas, we went to Terry Black’s Barbecue based on Chen’s recommendation and it was amazing. We looked forward to going to more restaurants that he likes when we visit my parents again.
I even told my father about a tamale place that Chen recommended. My dad, who doesn’t like anything, has takeaway tamales and loved them.
So recently we had quite an eye opener when we saw one of his videos, “Mexican Birria Pizza, Ramen Restaurant and Life in St. Louis Missouri.” Uh, what was the last part?
We thought Chen might have passed through St. Louis on his way between Dallas and Chicago. Or maybe he remembered a visit to St. Louis when he attended Truman State University in Kirksville or spent part of his childhood in Quincy, Illinois, where his parents owned a restaurant – I actually asked Chen to go to St. Louis made recommendations for the cameo, but he didn’t seem to remember much.
But no. The video starts in New York City, then Chen goes to Chicago. Eventually, Chen goes to St. Louis and announces that he is moving at least part-time because his new girlfriend now lives there.
This was amazing news as Chen visits many local restaurants and gives interesting, humorous reviews in every city he lives in. We couldn’t wait to see the first place he went.
It was also kind of shocking that Chen would retire, fond of calling our state “misery” when looking back on his time here.
Since Mike’s St. Louis apartment is an apartment overlooking Forest Park, he went to a nearby BBQ area called Beast Butcher & Block.
It looked amazing so we decided to go there a few days later on our anniversary. Chen ate this 30 ounce pork steak that I had to try.
“As soon as you take a bite, the smoke just goes in and covers your taste buds and stays on the tip of your tongue,” Chen said.
I’ve eaten homemade pork steak before, but I’ve never eaten the St. Louis delicacy in a restaurant, especially a smoked pork steak.
It was quite a bit of meat, so I shared a fair bit of it with my wife. The meat was the tenderest I’ve ever eaten and it almost melted in my mouth. It costs $ 18.99, quite a deal for all the meat you get. (For the record, it was the only meal we ate that day.)
The only weird thing was that the potato salad wasn’t the seared potato salad Mike ate in the video. Maybe because of the video they had a run on the seared potato salad – the “Mikey-Chen effect” is documented.
Since then, Chen has made a few other videos in St. Louis. We have never been to any of the restaurants he rated in town even though he went to an Asian market that we recently considered but decided against it because we had the dogs in the car. (If I could give Chen a tip it would be to try the Pan-Asia Supermarket in Manchester.)
So there are plenty of new places to try. Some of them are near my wife’s work in St. Louis, so I keep asking her to buy something to take home and bring it home.
We don’t expect Mike to stay in St. Louis forever. Along with Dallas, where he says he will still be living part-time, he has lived in Seattle and New York for the past few years.
We also spent time in all of these areas which helped make the videos interesting. If you compare the view from Chen’s St. Louis apartment to the small one in Seattle, that says a lot about the cost of housing in the two areas – and one reason we left the Pacific Northwest.
And even if Chen lives somewhere, he doesn’t spend that much time at home. Before the pandemic, he traveled a lot internationally. He’s recently toured the United States, spending time in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
But many food travel shows have neglected St. Louis – the newest Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives show to be filmed there in 2012 – so it’s cool to have a food traveler and shows that are filmed there regularly will .
Hopefully Mike will even try out some of the great restaurants in Franklin County at some point.
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