My wife and I are great fans of the show, We have all the DVD’s, seen most if not all of the episodes. We are both convinced you should do Belgium. Belgium might not get a lot of votes because it’s kinda small and not very well known culinary wize but it's a serious country for foodies. Disclaimer I am from Belgium but my wife is not and she is convinced too!

Like so many of the countries that fit the show well, Belgium has been conquered, ruled and therefore influenced by a long list of countries. And you can taste it all in the cooking. The producers will be amazed, once they dig in, how many different food treasures Belgium has. Anthony has French roots so he might be a bit chauvinistic about this but really, Belgium is a treasure chest of great foods and drinks that is eclipsed by it’s bigger, better known and more chauvinistic neighbors like France, Germany, Holland,...

1. Sorry Belgians do Mussels, chocolates and French fries better then anybody else in the world. First the mussels, I am sure you have eaten a pot full of black clams from Seattle or Prince Edward Island but until you ate them in Belgium you ain’t seen nothing yet. There are two types of places to eat them. There are a couple of simple restaurants that only (or mostly) do mussels and that do a great job at it or you can eat them in at one of the countless fundraiser events the Chiro (something like the Scouts) has. Instead of doing car washes we do this, we cook food for one night at an improvised place to raise some money for the kids to go on camp. The moms of the boys and girls will come together and slave away and share their years of cooking experience with other folks. Really simple, really good, real people. Whatever you would do you will be blown away by the quality of the food.
2. The fries can be eaten with the mussels or just separately at a fritkot. Again something quintessential Belgian in so many ways. Sometimes it just an old trailer illegally parked on a corner operated for 40 years by the same person who bakes for long hours and for not much money, sometimes it’s fancier. The fritkoten come in all different shapes and sizes. Very Belgian. Under treat from stricter zoning laws but for now part of every day life. Off course we have some fried meats with those as well, nothing like the Dutch crap that come out of the wall from a vending machine, again, the Belgians do it their own way.
3. And yeah the mayo is really good too. Thick, creamy, heavy, lots of eggs, lots of fat, gotta try it with fries. You will wonder why you ever liked it with ketchup
4. I still to this day do not know why the heck the Swiss are better known for their Chocolates. You gotta visit a couple of the artisanal Belgian chocolate places, you will want to dive into the chocolate pot, so good it is. It’s all about the cacao content off course. The crap you can get in most other- non Belgian- places that passes for chocolate is just to cry for
5. Pies and pastries. For pies you would definitely have to visit the South of Limburg. The region has lots of hard fruits and therefore tradition of fruit pies and cakes.
6. The beers, as mentioned by many others before are sublime. I know the show does not focus on beverages per se but we have a great beer tradition in Belgium and there is great cuisine of cooking with beer that would fit the show very well. As to variety we have over 800 different types of beer. So if you stay for 2 years, you can drink a different beer every day and never drink the same beer twice. As you might know, we have a different type of glass for every beer. To bring out the best of the beer. Serving a beer in a wrong glass is blasphemous. That’s how obsessed we are about food and beer! More importantly, the beers are very good. Although the Germans (and the Dutch with Heineken) are better known around the world for their beers, the Belgian beers have a lot more variety (and are a lot better than Heineken). By the way, the beers I am talking about have nothing to do with the dishwashwater Stella you can get in Manhattan. No this is the real stuff. Compared to the Germans you could say that the German like things done a certain way, by the rule. And so they have a few types of beers that are all done pretty much the same way, according to the same rules. Very nicely done in most cases but just not very daring. The Belgians are more experimental with beers and we have a ton of stellar ones. Highlights are the trappist beers, Duvel, Liefmans cherry beer, lambics,... The lambic beers for instance are made from with a natural fermentation process with a bacteria that only exist in the Zenne valley in Brussels. Wouldn’t you want to taste that?

Juxtaposed to all this great food you could talk about Belgiums political struggle. The country is culturally and politically nearly split in half because it is torn between the Flemish and the French communities. That is the reason what makes it culinary interesting but that is also what might make it disappear one day…

By the way, I wrote all of this in 15 min, I am sure there is much more I just can’t think of right now

Come on, wouldn’t this be a great show or what!