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Founded in 1958 on the north side of Gonzales, Texas' courthouse square, Gonzales Food Market is still youthful in Texas barbecue years. Yet, in its relative obscurity and unreconstructed nature (the place still functions fully as a grocery store, the front well-stocked with boxed cereals, snacks, food staples, and cleaning supplies), it most perfectly illustrates how the Lone Star State's great barbecues evolved from food markets. Also, the barbecue is damn good, cheaper than usual, and you don't have to contend with the tourist hordes that haunt places like Kreuz Market and Louie Mueller's.

[This is the eighth installment of Great Barbecues of Texas. Read the entire series here.]

Veteran of Chickenbone Cafe, Five Ninth, and the Fatty empire, Zak Pelaccio fled the city with wife Jori Emde last year to settle in Old Chatham, NY, up in Columbia County. This region of rolling hills and horse farms is sandwiched between the Hudson River and the Massachusetts border southeast of Albany. But what are the pair up to now?

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As you were chowing down at the Lower East Side's Mission Chinese Food did you ever wonder what the equivalent dishes were like at the San Francisco original? Well, I did, too, and I finally had the chance to compare the two places last Friday. Here's a diary juxtaposing photos of corresponding dishes at the two restaurants, though often taken months apart.

[See More Fork in the Road on the Road: Report From Oaksterdam: 'Scrip No Longer Needed To Buy Marijuana | New York's Pizza Rival | Where To Eat in Washington, D.C.]

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A few months ago, I wrote about a batch of cannabis caramel corn that a friend brought back from Oakland. She'd gotten it at a place she described as a recent Bay Area phenomenon: marijuana stores that sell their products on the sly, without all the rigmarole of prescriptions and state government oversight. They've gone underground in reaction to pressure by the Federal Government on growers and dispensaries, and in response to a laissez faire attitude on the part of the government of Oakland - which calls itself Oaksterdam in emulation of Amsterdam - and other municipalities. I had to check out the phenomenon for myself.

[See More: Our 10 Best Marijuana Stories]

Stand on nearly any thoroughfare in Buenos Aires, and you're never far from a pizzeria. Cross a street at random and find yourself dodging scooters delivering hot pies, while delivery boys on foot hoist flat boxes overhead to navigate crowds swarming the streets. One quickly concludes that pizza is wildly popular among Portenos ("People of the Port"), easily as popular as in Naples, where pizza was invented, or maybe even in New York, which boasts the world's greatest and most diverse pizza culture. I recently spent a week in the South American capital pondering the pizza phenomenon there.

Most New Yorkers find themselves in D.C. from time to time for business reasons, to visit friends, or as patriotic sightseers. I found myself in the nation's capital last week for the first time in a couple of years to receive an award on behalf of Fork in the Road at the Association of Food Journalists. I shouldn't have waited so long to visit.

[See More On the Road: Robert in Kansas City | Weirdest Food Truck in San Francisco

News on Eater that the celebrated Boston chefs Jamie Bissonnette and Ken Oringer had their hearts set on opening a branch of Toro - their Catalan tapas bar - in Chelsea, in the same building that houses Del Posto and Colicchio & Sons, led me to seek out one of their restaurants in Beantown to see if these guys can cook. The short answer is, they can. And their cooking is wild-ass enough that it's likely to go over big in New York.

[See More On the Road: Weird Food Truck in San Francisco | Watermelon Shop in Texas! | Delicious Kansas City Oddball Burgers]

The last week of April, Peter Meehan, Jonathan Gold, and I went to Kansas City for three days of binge eating. The conversations that ensued have been edited and presented in the fourth issue of Lucky Peach -- the Summer, 2012 edition. In it we mainly talk about food and music. By my count the three of us managed to eat in 22 places total, though sometimes not as a full crew.

Tracy Van Dyk

The truck can usually be found parked in San Francisco's Knob Hill

NYC has certainly got lots of unusual food trucks, peddling predictable sorts of fusion and just plain odd combinations of ingredients. We've got a couple that merge Korean and Mexican, while another mixes Mexican and barbecue. We have even have one that offers pulled pork atop a Belgian waffle. But, alas, we have San Francisco to thank for coming up with what is perhaps the strangest food combination of all: Irish and Eritrean.

"I never eat franks," a friend exclaimed, "I don't know what's in them." But when our party arrived at Rutt's Hut, founded by Abe and Anna Rutt in 1928 in Clifton, NJ, she quickly relaxed her standards.