Who Is Mark Wiens? The Food Traveller Behind Epic Food Journeys

Mark Wiens is an American food and travel YouTuber based in Bangkok, known for his infectious on-camera enthusiasm and deep respect for street food culture. He built one of the world's largest food channels on YouTube and fronts Epic Food Journeys, the National Geographic YouTube Original series produced by CreatorsLab.

If you’ve ever fallen down a street food rabbit hole on YouTube, you’ve met Mark Wiens. He’s the one tilting his head back with his eyes closed, genuinely overcome by a bowl of noodles, in a video that somehow makes you book a flight.

We’ve spent months on the road with him making Epic Food Journeys, so this is partly a profile and partly a field report.

From Phoenix to everywhere

Mark was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but his childhood barely touched America. His family moved internationally when he was young, and he grew up between countries and cuisines - an upbringing that explains a lot about a man whose home base is Bangkok and whose comfort food is som tam.

After university he did what a lot of restless graduates do: he travelled. Unlike most, he wrote it down. His blog, Migrationology, documented food across Asia with a completist’s devotion, and the YouTube channel that followed turned that devotion into one of the largest food audiences on the platform, with millions of subscribers and billions of views accumulated over more than a decade of near-constant uploading.

Why his videos work

Plenty of creators eat on camera. Almost none of them have Mark’s effect, where a two-minute clip of grilled chicken in Bangkok leaves you emotionally invested in a woman you’ve never met and her charcoal technique.

Having filmed with him, we can tell you the secret is unglamorous: it’s sincerity. The reactions aren’t performed. He is exactly that enthusiastic off camera, at the seventh stall of the day, when the crew is wilting and the light is going. And he’s built his career on a simple ethical foundation - the cook is the star, not him. He asks questions like someone who wants the answer. He eats what he’s given, the way locals eat it. He never punches down at food that ordinary people love.

That’s also why cooks open up to him. Doors that would stay shut to a camera crew swing open for Mark, because people can tell the difference between being featured and being used.

The move to National Geographic

By the time we developed Epic Food Journeys together, Mark had already crossed from YouTube into mainstream television, including fronting a Netflix series about Singapore’s food culture. The question for us was what a Mark Wiens show should look like with National Geographic’s canvas and a documentary crew behind him.

The answer was to go bigger on the journeys and deeper on the cultures. Six episodes, six countries - Jamaica, Mexico City, New York, Istanbul, Senegal, Pakistan - each one built around the dishes a place can’t be understood without. Mark goes night fishing and jungle foraging. He eats through Dakar for 24 hours straight. The show kept the DNA of his channel, the closeness and the joy, and gave it the scale of a Nat Geo production.

Audiences responded. The series became one of National Geographic’s highest-performing YouTube series and picked up a Webby Award, with a Shorty Awards nomination alongside.

What working with him taught us

Two things, mainly. First, authenticity scales. The instinct in television is to polish spontaneity out of a show; every note we got back from audiences said the unpolished moments were the ones they rewatched. Second, appetite is a universal language. We shot in six countries with six crews’ worth of local fixers, and in every one of them, the fastest way past any barrier - language, suspicion, shyness - was Mark asking someone what he should eat.

You can watch every episode free on National Geographic’s YouTube channel. Start at the show page, pick a country, and don’t do it hungry.