If you ever find yourself in Ocean City, New Jersey and hear someone order a “Jason the Disgrace-on” breakfast sandwich; or if, on vacation in Italy, you happen to bite into a “Pizza Jason”; or, if, on a jaunt to Reykjavik, you are ever served a pear tart dessert called a “Peruterta Jasonar,” you have but one man to thank: Jason Wilson. Yes, Wilson is an accomplished travel writer. Sure, he is the series editor of Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American Travel Writing” anthology. But these accomplishments pale in comparison to his gastronomical-nomenclatural travel hat trick. As a result of his encounters with various people in his journeys, three food dishes—three!—have been named after him. We’ve all heard about travelers who claimed to have visited 182 countries, or who speak a dozen languages without an accent, or who have ridden a camel or some other poor creature across three continents. But this is something else entirely. This is a feat that seems at once within every traveler’s grasp and yet tantalizingly out-of-reach—nearly impossible to achieve, in fact, through mere serendipity. And yet Wilson never set out to accomplish this. I had to learn more, so I recently peppered Wilson with questions via e-mail.

World Hum: This is truly impressive—the kind of accomplishment most travelers can only dream of. Congratulations.

Thanks for your effusive praise. Although, to be honest, my accomplishments are well within most people’s reach. There are basically two approaches to having a food or beverage named after you. The first approach is pretty straightforward: Be famous. For instance, I once ate a sandwich called a “Patsy Cline” at Mandan Drug in Mandan, North Dakota. Which was outstanding, by the way.

The second approach takes kind of like the opposite strategy. You end up hanging around someplace way too much—in a friendly way, but for absolutely no discernible reason. You hang around so much that you come very very close to being a nuisance. Not a nuisance, but almost ... therein lies the skill, I guess. Finally, people just name something for you—a dish, a drink, a corner, a table. It’s like, you’re always around, and they can’t really understand why, but they like you—or at least tolerate you—so they have to account for you in some way. I’m thinking I learned a term for this process way back in my college anthropology class. But of course I forget it now. Anyway, we shouldn’t get too academic here. I’ll just say that the second approach has clearly worked like a charm for me.

Let’s take them one at a time. How did you come to have a dessert named after you in an Icelandic cookbook?

Here’s the basic story. I’ve spent a good deal of time in Iceland, and I was once the editor-in-chief of the influential magazine Coffee Journal. Very influential. When we spoke, the international coffee market listened. At least for a little while, since Coffee Journal went out of business after only a few years.

Anyway, while covering the coffee beat, I met a lot of cool people. I was on a coffee farm in Nicaragua and the owner and I were talking and I happened to mention I was going to Iceland in a few weeks (it would be like my second visit). He insisted that I look up a friend of his, an Icelandic coffee roaster. I did, and I met my friend Addý Hedinsdottir. She owns a company called Kaffitár and they have several popular cafes in and around Reykjavik, and they roast simply the best coffee in the world. So I kept going back to Iceland, about a dozen times for varying stays including one whole summer, and while there I always hang around Kaffitár and spend time with Addý and her family, and with another friend Sonja, who happens to be the best barista in the world. Addý always picks me up at the airport, early in the morning, and welcomes me to Iceland with her fabulous coffee and a great breakfast. So, a few years ago, Addy and Sonja published a cookbook on things that go well with coffee. And in that cookbook they named a dessert, a pear tart (pictured here), after me. The dessert is called Peruterta Jasonar, which I believe translates to Jason’s Pear Tart, though I must confess I speak very little Icelandic.

I should also note that they named a dessert after my wife, too, some espresso-flavored cookies called Kaffidadar Gunnvör (Gunnvör means Jennifer in Icelandic). To be honest, my dessert is much better than hers. Jason’s Pear Tart is delicious.

Okay, so what’s the story with the pizza?

When I was a dopey 19-year-old student, with birkenstocks and a University of Vermont Bong Team T-shirt, I lived with a family in a small village in northern Italy, near Cremona. I’m sure the Bernabe family never realized then that for the next 16 years they would be subjected to regular return visits from their exchange student. But they have been. I’ll just show up for a few days and it’s like I never left. There’s always a room in the house that’s “mine.” There’s always drop-in visits from aunts and neighbors. There’s a specific time I’m expected home for dinner. If I’m looking for friends, I don’t even call, because I know that they’re always at one of two bars. If I stay out too late, Mama Bernabe worries and waits up. This is how I know that the Bernabes are truly a second family: Mama Bernabe treats me exactly as my own mother does. No matter how old I get, in her eyes I will forever be a dopey 19-year-old. In this case, a manchild with a shaky grasp of Italian grammar.

Okay, so the pizza.

One night a few years ago the family took me to a pizzeria in a neighboring village. We were looking at a huge chalkboard full of pizza choices. Everyone ordered, and I was taking a little too long with my decision-making, and so everyone began to fuss in that endearing Italian way. “What? You don’t see anything you like? Do you need a translation? Should we order for you?” Finally, Daniela ("mia sorella") said, a tad impatiently, “If you don’t see a pizza you like, they’ll make any pizza you want.” The waiter, also impatiently, reiterated this.

At that moment, for some reason, the words “Gorgonzola” and “pear” and “speck” entered my brain. It didn’t seem any stranger than the “Hawaii” Pizza or the “Texas BBQ” Pizza on the chalkboard. And so I verbalized it: “May I have my pizza with Gorgonzola and pear and speck?”

All conversation stopped. The waiter looked at me like I may be mentally incompetent. He looked beseechingly at the family as if I needed special help with my Italian. But no, I repeated my order. He rubbed his stomach as if he were ill.

Everyone at the table burst out laughing. Whoever heard of a pizza like that? Gorgonzola and pears! And speck! That’s the craziest pizza we’ve ever heard of! Ah, Jason, the perpetually dopey 19-year-old! Always the mischief-maker!

And all through dinner, it went on. Every time the waiter came over, the family laughed and apologized: “Ah, he’s American, you see. This is probably the kind of pizza George Bush eats. Don’t be alarmed.” I offered samples to everyone at the table, just to show them how good the pizza really was—and it was very good. But none of them would entertain one bite.

Near the end of the meal, the chef came out of the kitchen to see who was actually eating a pizza with Gorgonzola and pears and speck.

That’s when everyone suggested that this pizza should have a name: “Pizza Jason.”

Except here’s the thing—in Italy, almost no one can pronounce my name correctly. In fact, when I introduce myself as “Jason” nearly everyone says at first, “Jackson? Like Michael Jackson?”

So when the chef repeated the name, he of course called it “Pizza Jackson”—like Michael Jackson. And so if you happen to be in this small northern Italian village, and for some reason you want a pizza that has gorgonzola, pear, and speck, you should ask for a Pizza Jackson.

Frankly, I don’t find the pizza all that unique. I mean, I think they have a pizza like this at California Pizza Kitchen. Which of course may raise all kinds of other issues we probably should avoid here.

Good call. So what’s the story behind the breakfast sandwich?

The breakfast sandwich, alas, is something of a bittersweet tale. When I got out of school, I lived for a few years at the Jersey Shore, in a town called Ocean City, “America’s Greatest Family Resort.” It’s a real conservative, Republican town, and it’s where I’d spent summers as a kid, at my grandmother’s house. I worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Atlantic City, at which I covered the Jersey Shore gamut: casino happenings, the rising cost of beach tags, sandcastle-building contests, lifeguard races, stranded marine mammals, unsolved murders under the boardwalk, syringes washing up on the beach, you name it.

One of the big—and underreported—stories of the early 1990s in Ocean City was that the small old-fashioned beach cottages were rapidly being torn down and replaced with McMansion duplexes, multi-million-dollar monstrosities that all pretty much looked the same.

At the time, I was renting small old-fashioned seasonal cottages. Living at the Jersey Shore was very fun in the summertime, especially since I could show up for work pretty late in the day and still file my stories. This was good because most of my friends were still in various stages of pre-employment and worked summer jobs like Water Ice Scooper or Beach Tag Checker or Fruit & Vegetable Stand Assistant and were forever dragging me out to Reggae Night, Wing Night, Quarter Draft Night, 3-for-1 Night, 7-for-1 Night at bars in various beach towns ... and then after closing time, there was always Atlantic City nearby, which was open 24 hours a day.

But in the winter it was a different story. In winter, Ocean City goes from a population of like 200,000 to less than like 15,000. All my summer friends would pack up and go home, and I was left finding things to do in a ghost town.

Since I was awake MUCH earlier in the wintertime, I would go eat breakfast every morning at a place called the 52nd Street Market. I had been going to the 52nd Street Market since childhood, but back then I was merely a tourist (a “shoobie” in Jersey Shore parlance). During those winter mornings, however, I started sitting with the regulars, the locals—the dry-wallers, the roofers, the painters, and the landscapers who were also left behind for the winter, the guys tearing down the old cottages and building the brand new McMansions. Even though I was a representative of “the fucking liberal media,” I was usually unshaven and wore ripped flannel shirts and a baseball hat, so I was pretty non-threatening.

The older woman who owned the 52nd Street Market was a born-again Christian who listened at low-volume to a religious music station. She never preached to us, though if things got a little carried away at the morning table and the f-bomb started flying, she would glare over and scold us. Her adult son, Ed, did most of the cooking and his morning specialty was the breakfast sandwich. He was an honest-to-god artist of the breakfast sandwich.

The breakfast sandwich I ordered every morning was: Three eggs, three slices of American cheese, and three slices of grilled pork roll. Always on a hoagie roll. Generously salted and peppered.

If you do not know what pork roll is, you are probably not from New Jersey or the Greater Philadelphia region, and I am sad for you. Pork roll is a sausage-like pork product, often called Taylor Ham, that is served in thin slices. Some people say it is similar to Canadian bacon. These people are fools. Canadian bacon is a below average pork product. Pork roll is like manna from heaven.

And if you are from New Jersey or Philadelphia, there is nothing particularly unique about this breakfast sandwich—lots of people eat these every day at diners or from under the heatlamps at Wawa. But at the 52nd Street Market, Ed made sure that every one of his regulars had a breakfast sandwich named after themselves.

One regular, a surfer/roofer named Moon, took to calling me “Jason the Disgrace-on” for reasons we will absolutely not get into here. Jason the Disgrace-on. Not high level poetry, but not a bad off-rhyme either. Anyway, Ed very much enjoyed that nickname, and so forever thereafter, my breakfast sandwich became known as a Jason the Disgrace-on. As in, “One ‘Jason the Disgrace-on’ coming up!”

Ah, sometimes I find myself biting into an egg, pork roll, and cheese sandwich, and it is like Proust’s Madeline ... and the memory so bittersweet…

The 52nd Street Market is no longer there. Like every single one of the cottages I rented in Ocean City, the market did not survive the 20th century. Between one summer and another, like a snap of the fingers, it was torn down and replaced by a gigantic summer McMansion, a duplex that probably rents for $5,000 a week. There is no trace of my old corner breakfast spot. A few years later, someone said they saw Ed working at the CVS.

I’m sure the “Jason the Disgrace-on” lives on through at least a few discerning breakfast chefs. Any final tips for others who’d like to follow in your food-naming footsteps?

Well, I think you can’t be too much of a food snob. I mean, I hate to say it, but a chef like Jamie Oliver or Jean-George Vongerichten or Charlie Trotter is most likely not going to name a dish after you. You’re going to have to seek out places where there aren’t lots of famous or important people hanging out. Though I guess if you go places where the people are famous, but only famous in Iceland, you’d have a shot.

Also, you can NEVER ask a place to name something after you. That’s a foul. Very bad form. Instead, you have to be rather Zen about things.

Finally, I think it really helps to have a lack of several things: direction, ambition, goals—those sorts of things. You have to be someone who’s willing to put in a lot of time hanging around, eating, drinking, chatting, reading the newspaper(s). I cannot stress this enough.

That sounds like very sound advice. Thanks, Jason.

Jim Benning is the co-editor of World Hum.