About The Thirsty Pig

Snapshots of the Wet, Savory, & Delectable.

The Thirsty Pig is a food, drink, and dining adventure blog that has been exploring restaurants, street food, cocktails, and culinary culture since 2007. From the legendary Hainan Chicken at Savoy Kitchen in the SGV to late-night ramen runs in Little Tokyo, from cocktail experiments to food truck hunts across LA — and culinary adventures in Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, and beyond — this blog documents it all.

The Numbers

  • 2,120 total posts
  • 929 blog posts recovered from the archives (2007-2017)
  • 1,191 Instagram posts imported
  • 39 restaurants that have since closed

History

The Thirsty Pig started in late 2008 on Blogspot at blog.thethirstypig.com, documenting dining adventures across Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. The blog quickly grew with restaurant reviews, cocktail-of-the-week features, and dining guides.

In 2009, the blog moved to WordPress at thethirstypig.com, adding more structure with categories, tags, and a proper theme. By 2011, it had expanded to cover restaurants in Shanghai, Taipei, and other cities around the world.

Around 2013, the site migrated again to thirstypig.com on WordPress, where it continued publishing through 2017.

Meanwhile, the Instagram account (@thirstypig) became the primary platform for sharing food adventures, with posts dating back to 2011 and continuing to the present day.

The Rebuild (2026)

In March 2026, the entire Thirsty Pig archive was rebuilt from scratch using modern web technology. Here's where all the content came from:

Wayback Machine Recovery

All three original domains had gone offline, but the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine had preserved the content. A custom Python scraper was built to:

  • Query the Wayback Machine's CDX API for all archived URLs across three domains
  • Fetch and parse 1,166 archived HTML pages
  • Extract titles, dates, categories, tags, and body content
  • Convert HTML to Markdown
  • Deduplicate 228 posts that existed on multiple domains
  • Download 2,846 images from Wayback Machine and Blogspot CDN archives

Instagram Import

1,649 Instagram posts were imported from Meta's data export (JSON format), including 4,664 images and 213 videos. Posts with missing timestamps were recovered using media-level timestamps and folder date metadata.

Restaurant Categorization

An automated categorizer script parsed post titles and content to extract restaurant names, cities, and regions — mapping each to categories like San Gabriel Valley, Downtown LA, Pasadena, Shanghai, and more. 39 permanently closed restaurants were detected and marked.

Tech Stack

  • Astro — static site generator (zero JavaScript shipped by default)
  • Tailwind CSS v4 — utility-first styling
  • Tina CMS — Git-backed visual content editing
  • Vercel — hosting and deployment
  • Python — scraper, importer, and categorizer scripts
  • Leaflet.js — interactive restaurant map

The entire site is static — no database, no server-side processing. Every page is pre-built as plain HTML and served from Vercel's global CDN. The site builds 2,120+ pages in under 60 seconds.

Connect

View the changelog for a detailed history of site updates.