Their focus was not on deluxe fare, but on everyday local food – barbecue, chili, fried chicken, apple pie – and the unpretentious restaurants that serve it: diners, small-town cafes, seaside shacks, drive-ins, and bake shops.
At first, their focus was on popular culture in general, but after traveling around the country for a few years, they realized they had been keeping an informal diary of unknown and unique places to eat: inconspicuous restaurants that were, at the time, of no interest to the food-writing establishment.
After three years of travel in a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, staying at seedy motels, and occasionally sleeping in the back seat of the car, they drafted the manuscript of Roadfood, a guide to restaurants that were neither fast food nor gourmet dining, but were an expression of local foodways.
The Sterns have also written Roadfood columns for Gourmet magazine and Saveur and report regularly about "road food" on public radio's The Splendid Table.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review about Two for the Road, the Sterns' memoir of their pursuit of "road food", Nora Ephron commented, "Jane and Michael Stern write about ordinary food so simply and exuberantly that I couldn't help thinking, as I read this latest book of theirs (the 31st), that they deserved a room of their own in the Smithsonian Institution, right next to Julia Child's Cambridge kitchen.