Pennsylvania boasts some incredible and unique foods, but finding them isn’t always as easy as devouring them.
Expert food reviewers don’t make it to most parts of the state, and can’t cover every local fave even when they come to town. Public review pages are liable to be targeted with dishonest or straight-up fake reviews. Meanwhile, social media is overrun with influencers, some of whom may be promoting restaurants just to get a free meal.
What’s a hungry foodie to do?
Three Pennsylvanians have charted a better way, using their palates, passion, and networks to plot the commonwealth’s rich culinary landscape.
Their maps cover fish fries, Philadelphia eateries, and niche hot dogs, and introduce people to some of the state’s good eats and hidden gems.
PA Local spoke with them about the motivations behind their maps, the communities that help them find and maintain all this information, and their personal food journeys.
Their stories illustrate the diversity of Pennsylvania’s food scene and the staying power of its regional traditions. A good meal, it turns out, is always worth sharing.
Finding fish fries in Western Pa.
Every Friday during Lent, the 40-day Christian observance leading up to Easter, the Pittsburgh area spawns communal lunches and dinners centered around fried fish. From churches to firehalls to food trucks, there are literally hundreds of places throughout the region that participate.
Maintained by a cadre of volunteers who track down and verify details about every local fish fry they can find, the interactive Pittsburgh Lenten Fish Fry Map is designed to help people discover and navigate this expansive world of golden batter and homemade fixings.
Hollen Barmer, the map’s founder, considers herself a “nebby neighbor,” so she went to her first fish fry in the mid-aughts out of curiosity. A love for the community surrounding the events made the native Tennessean, who moved to Pittsburgh for grad school in 2000, want to experience more of them.
“I love the culture,” Barmer told PA Local. “I love the foodways. Especially the eastern European sides, like halušky and pierogies. You can sometimes find kitchens where people are still hand-making that stuff, and it’s really, really neat.”
Barmer still goes to at least one fish fry nearly every Friday in Lent — often taking time off work — and shares dispatches about the food and the vibes on the map’s Facebook page.
The project started out as a Google Map of just the 40 or 50 locations included on a list published by the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, Barmer said. She added more as she saw them advertised. Then it “kind of took off” when she shared the map in 2012 and other people started using it, Barmer said.
From there, she started putting some “very basic handmade” pins on the map to indicate some of each fry’s features, like if it had lunchtime hours or offered pierogies.
Since then, her creation has bloomed. Barmer partnered with Pittsburgh Code for Good in the mid-2010s to migrate the map to a new platform to make it more user-friendly. They added filters for certain criteria, like whether a fish fry is handicap accessible, offers takeout, or serves alcohol. Thousands of visitors now use it each Lent. This Ash Wednesday, about 7,500 unique users visited the website, and around 6,000 viewed it on the first Friday of Lent, per Barmer.
Maintaining the map as it’s grown has become a group effort, Barmer said. Developers Christian Gass and Mark Howe manage the technical side, and other volunteers sit down together before Lent each year to update the map.
This year, around 10 people showed up to that initial mapping blitz and added 80 fish fries, Barmer said, with other volunteers adding more throughout the season.
As of this week, the 2026 version of the map features 277 locations. Most are clustered in Western Pennsylvania, between Mercer and Greene Counties, but there are also outliers, like a lone listing in Gettysburg.
There’s no hard-and-fast rules for how far from Pittsburgh the events on the map need to be, said Barmer, who personally added entries in central Pennsylvania near her in-laws and a few in West Virginia she visited while seeing friends.
“I think often the people who come to do volunteer mapping, they might have relatives, or they might have lived up near Erie at one point … so if it is reasonably around sort of the Pittsburgh area, it’s fine,” she said.
Barmer thinks the map has become so popular because, in an area with a strong tech sector, it uses technology to help people — particularly younger folks and newcomers — experience older regional traditions.
“It’s kind of bridging that gap between the tradition and the new stuff,” she said.
‘You have to nail it’
Lots of people will tell you which restaurants are worth visiting in Pennsylvania’s largest city, but “Djour” — the pseudonym for a Philadelphia resident and lifelong foodie who originally hails from South Jersey — doesn’t believe they’re all worth listening to.
Fed up with influencers accepting freebies from restaurants, and questionable review sites, Djour set out about three years ago to be a different sort of online voice on Philly food, he told PA Local.
Keeping his personal identity private to avoid any special treatment from restaurants, he started a website where he maps out food spots he believes are worth a visit in a city with a huge number of eateries — and high-quality ones, at that.
“I think the best thing about Philly’s food scene is it’s got a low barrier of entry, but it’s got a high standard,” he said of restaurants trying to make their mark. “You can have a lot more creative liberty because the barrier of the pricing to begin isn’t as damning as like a New York City or Chicago or L.A. … then there’s also the tougher side of it — Philly doesn't have that disposable income for haphazard, mediocre restaurants. You have to nail it.”
Djour adds food spots to his map when they’re good, and omits them entirely when he’s not impressed. Each place on the map gets a star rating: one star for restaurants that’re good to try “when in the neighborhood,” two for places that are “worth the commute,” and a rare three when an eatery is an absolute must-try.
The map actually comprises a bunch of smaller maps. Locals and visitors can use it to navigate Djour-approved options for foods commonly associated with Philly, like cheesesteaks, hoagies, or water ice.
But his map goes beyond basic fare, including filters for elements like outdoor dining, Quizzo nights, pinball, and over 40 different types of cultural cuisine.
“I think honestly Philly’s best strength is our Southeast Asian community of food,” Djour said, shouting out Cambodian spots like the acclaimed noodle house Mawn, the Filipino BYOB Tabachoy, the city’s Vietnamese food scene, and the beloved outdoor Southeast Asian Market.
Building the map is a big undertaking. Djour has tried many of the eateries himself, but also adds places recommended by people he personally trusts and sources he perceives as reflecting “authentic” opinions. These include r/PhiladelphiaEats, Discord servers, and restrictive forums and Facebook groups.
The project has a solid following. Djour, who also calls himself the “Map Guy,” often posts his maps to Reddit for feedback, and shares his food-related takes, including alignment-style charts for various types of cuisine, with his nearly 49,000 Instagram followers.
His Philly-area map (he also maps other East Coast cities) is currently confined to just the city and a handful of picks in surrounding suburbs, but he hopes to eventually have it span from State College to the Jersey Shore.
His overall goal is to help people find good food and not waste their time and money.
“If it’s on the map, it's worth going to,” he said. “There’s no need to say anything bad. There’s no … saying anything is spectacular, even though it may be or may not. All you need to know is it’s good, and you can have sanctity of heart of what you’re eating is worthwhile for the sake of your splurge.”
Illustrating Pa.’s (surprisingly extensive) hot dog scene
As Barmer and Djour focused on the corners of the state, artist and frankfurter connoisseur Hawk Krall targeted the whole keystone.
Ever heard of Erie-style dogs? How about the Easton MOP (mustard-onion-pickle) dog? Perhaps the Scranton Texas-style weiner?
Krall depicts these lesser-known varieties and many, many more on his highly detailed statewide map, confidently dubbed “The Great Pennsylvania Hot Dog Map.”
Krall manages to fit over 100 current and former hot dog sellers onto the illustration, from lunch counters to commercial plants, along with a “rough guide” to some of Pennsylvania’s hyper-regional styles.
It isn’t totally geographically accurate because some regions had to be stretched to accommodate for a high density of hot dog purveyors. Nor is it comprehensive. But the map surveys the past and present of Pennsylvania’s wiener landscape, which is surprisingly vast.
“Pennsylvania has a lot of cool hot dog stuff to offer,” Krall told PA Local. “There’s a lot of places, and a lot of places that you don’t really see being covered in the food media or maybe outside their local area.”
The map took Krall about one year to finish, he said. But decades of prior research, exploration, and hot-dog-eating experience informed the artistic (and gastronomical) quest. He’s personally been to “at least 50” of the places on his map, he told PA Local (although he admits some of those visits were over a decade ago).
A Montgomery County-based artist with family roots in Lebanon County, Krall began illustrating food about two decades ago, when he was working as a line cook in Philadelphia. A fan of glizzies since childhood, he started drawing them when he pitched a regional hot dog series to the then-nascent food blog Serious Eats.
That weekly column, which he wrote and illustrated for three years, gave him national exposure, Krall told PA Local. He kept making hot dog-related art in other capacities, but later dropped the muse.
His interest in the dish didn’t totally fade, though. He slowly started getting back into hot dogs as he noticed growing interest in them, and decided to make the statewide map.
“There’s all these new places, and I think a new appreciation for the old places,” he said of the hot dog scene. “I just like going to like a small town in coal country or something and going to like a little hot dog spot that’s been there for a hundred years. There’s just great stories in those places.”
Krall’s process began by listing spots he’d personally visited. He then tapped fellow enthusiasts, including a friend who leads hot dog tours, and Liz Pavlovic, a West Virginia-based illustrator who draws that region’s franks. (“I have like four different hot dog group chats on Instagram, if that gives you an idea,” he said.)
Krall also went on several dayslong hot-dog-eating road trips with “some very dedicated friends,” sometimes drawing on internet research for recommendations.
“The thing about hot dogs is that, obviously … it’s not a health food, but like, they’re small,” he said. “So they’re really good for a road trip. You can hit four hot dog places on a day.”
His travels familiarized him with a variety of regional styles. He found strong hot dog cultures in unexpected places, and even created broad groupings for styles that didn’t have strong followings.
“Doing this map, there’s even stuff I didn’t know about, like New Castle, Pa., and Western Pennsylvania, that bills itself as the ‘Hot Dog Capital of the World.’ I had never heard that,” Krall said.
“I wrote about hot dogs for three years, full-time, and I’d never heard about New Castle.”
Hot dogs there, Krall explained, are often topped with a “super wet” chili that’s seasoned with “very Greek” spices — and he’d place them among “some of my favorite hot dogs in the state.”
Other standout areas of the state for Krall include Erie, where he found enough hot dog spots to occupy a week’s worth of eating. A wiener from the local meat producer Smith’s is typically the base, which is then topped with a “very dry and crumbly” chili. He also has a soft spot for Scranton-style Texas wieners in Northeast Pennsylvania, which he described as hot dogs that are nearly split in half, grilled to the point of char, served on a National Bakery bun, and topped with lots of chili.
“You need a knife and fork to eat it,” he said.
The final map (or, at least its first edition) includes food carts, lunch counters, restaurants, ice cream stands, and bars that Krall considers “really iconic.” There’s also his personal favorites, places with interesting offerings, and newer spots that he’s less familiar with in areas of the state that have fewer options. Signage at some of the spots influenced his lettering styles, and he also included commercial plants and small butchers that produce just the franks.
He worried that making fonts and images tiny to squeeze in everything he wanted to fit would complicate things for his printer Ralph Stollenwerk — a fellow hot dog fan — but Stollenwerk “always manages to get everything in there,” Krall said.
Although it was the first time he tackled all of Pennsylvania, the hot dog map isn’t Krall’s first swing at making a food map; he’s also drawn pizzerias and cheesesteak shops in Philly.
But while some of his previous maps have been commissioned, this project is ultimately driven by his strong passion for dawgs.
“I’ll just spend weeks reading about some new town and their hot dog history,” Krall said. “I truly enjoy this stuff, and, you know, spend more time than is necessary learning about it and then condensing it into a map.”