Those World Cup Tourists Loving American Food? They’re Not All What They Seem.

Last week, the governor of New Jersey and the state’s official account both retweeted a post on the social platform X with a video of “World Cup tourists” at a deli in Bergen County, discovering the glories of a chicken parm hero. The clip has been watched millions of times since then, one of many examples of foreign soccer fans greeting their first tastes of American cuisine with childlike wonder.

There’s one problem with the story. The traveler in the video, an Englishman named Daniel Tooke, ate the hero in April. By June 11, when the World Cup began, Tooke had been back home in Norwich for weeks.

At least Tooke is a real person. The same can’t be said for some other supposed World Cup tourists whose reactions to the eating and drinking rituals of the United States have beguiled the country.

The Italian man whose awestruck reaction to free Coke refills (“I can refill this 1,000 times!”) has become one of the most popular examples of the trope is played by a TikTok comedian named Fabio Farati. His video, first posted last year, is one of hundreds along the same lines that he’s produced since 2018, dramatizing his encounters with ranch dressing on pizza and fried chicken on pasta.

Nobunaga, the Japanese wanderer whose reverential written meditations on X about bottomless baskets of chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant in the United States, isn’t quite what some observers have taken him for, either. He is a pseudonymous character. He isn’t on his way to any World Cup games, either.

In response to a direct message, Nobunaga’s creator said the premise of the account is that an ancient samurai had traveled through time and space to land in the American heartland. When he wrote that “the trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it,” it was meant in a spirit somewhere between parody and cultural commentary.

This didn’t matter much on X. Trysta Krick, a founder of Daily W, a sports media company, for example, proclaimed the chips-and-salsa post “the greatest thing to come out of the World Cup experience by farrrrrr.”

Of course, many of the overseas soccer fans loose in the States this month are genuine. They do indeed pause between matches to take in the surrounding aromas and flavors. Often, they are as astonished as the putative 16th-century samurai.

After tearing into a bag of Beaver Nuggets at Buc-ee’s, Scottish traveler Shaun Alexander proclaimed, “The European mind cannot comprehend how intoxicatingly good these things are.” Elsa Thora, a visitor from Stockholm, got her first taste of ranch dressing and told the New York Post, “I won’t be able to live without it now.”

As charmed as they are by the United States, the United States is even more charmed by them. For the past week or two, the country has been gazing with delight at its own reflection in the cracked mirror of social media. World Cup tourists going gaga over gas-station cuisine and Big Gulps has become the feel-good story of the deep-fried American summer.

But some writers trawling for these stories cast a wide net, and not everything they haul in passes the smell test.

A roundup by Delish, a website owned by Hearst, included Farati’s free-refill video along with a photo of a tavern-style pizza cut into squares that was posted by an American-based X account that mainly covered Chicago sports teams until a week or so ago, when it added a German flag to its handle.

“What many of us take for granted, international visitors treat as full-blown cultural landmarks,” the Delish article explained. And while some commenters tried to unmask the newly German author of the Chicago account, others took the posts at face value.

People everywhere enjoy hearing the place they live praised by travelers. But tales of the World Cup tourist who falls in love with America may scratch a more troublesome itch.

“At a time when our federal government seems determined to put us at odds with the rest of the world, it’s lovely to be reassured that the world does not hate us, and perhaps more important, that we are capable of welcoming that world with open arms,” Mary McNamara, a culture critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote this week.

Many Americans seem willing to take their reassurance in any form they can get, even if it comes from fake German tourists, imaginary samurai and Englishmen whose timelines don’t quite sync up with the World Cup schedule.

Tooke, the star of the New Jersey deli video, studied sports broadcast journalism in college. He has mixed feelings about his newfound stardom. Accuracy in media concerns him. On the other hand, he considers the World Cup “the best sporting event in the world,” even though he’s not watching the games in person.

“There’s some serious irony that over 15 million people think I’m at the World Cup,” he said in an interview, when in reality “I’ve watched this whole thing unfold from England.”

Asked how he accounts for the ease with which his story was folded into the narrative of the rapturous soccer tourist, he became reflective.

“I think you’re inviting a larger conversation about people and their fact-checking and ability to spot little details,” he said. “They are taking things at face value, which is a scary thought in the larger picture. But the nicer part is that the hospitality is real.”

–

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Pete Wells/Hiroko Masuike
c. 2026 The New York Times Company

The post Those World Cup Tourists Loving American Food? They’re Not All What They Seem. appeared first on GV Wire.