It's never too late to expand your palate

Kent Burris isn’t your typical food influencer. The 62-year-old Texas highway construction executive spent most of his life sticking to a steady rotation of “meat and potatoes,” and not much else.

But these days, he’s sitting down in Ethiopian and Argentine restaurants and filming his first bites for nearly 400,000 online followers.

He goes by 'Dine.with.kent' online, with his personality doing most of the heavy lifting. “I’m the world’s grandpa,” Burris says, a title his audience has fully embraced. 

Scroll through his comments and you’ll find a steady stream of people saying some version of the same thing: I wish my dad would do this.

• Burris didn’t grow up around much cultural diversity, and for decades his food routine stayed in a tight loop. 
• That only changed after he walked into a Nigerian restaurant near his office, had an experience that didn’t quite click, then decided to give it another shot anyway.

That second visit ended up shaping everything. Instead of playing critic, Burris landed on a simple system: every dish is either “for me” or “not for me.”

And the people can’t get enough. Kent's audience has kept growing as he works his way through cuisines from around the world, often just asking staff what he should order and going with it.

Kent's advice is simple: don’t wait as long as he did. There’s a lot out there worth tasting.