A former food writer and editor for The Washington Post and the Miami Herald, Melissa Davis has written for such publications as Vanity Fair, Martha Stewart Living and House Beautiful. Her husband Peter Richmond, a New York Times bestselling author, was a staff writer at GQ for 14 years, and has contributed to such publications as the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. 

The exact day they discovered their passion for random road food in often-obscure locales would be hard to pin down, but the day in 1983 when they feasted on wild quail fajitas at a Mexican place in an inconspicuous strip mall in Space City, Texas, surely had something to do with it. Since then, they have devoted way too much of their lives to plying back roads in search of the unsung gems of the American road-food scene—the more unpretentious and friendly, the better, although this does not necessarily rule out places that sell their own tee-shirts. Between road trips, they live in New York's Hudson Valley.