How to Eat REALLY Well While Travelling!
- Lucy and the lens
- Sep 20, 2020
- 14 min read
Updated: Nov 15, 2020
Hi, my name is Lucy, and I am a shameless travel foodie.
I haven't always been, though: I used to be the kind of person who ordered chicken and fries - literally just chicken and fries - whenever I ate out at a restaurant. I'd never eaten a steak that wasn't well done, and peas were the only vegetables I was willing to work with.
Now, I don't think I ever order chicken, I once ate a different steak tartare every day of my trip to Tallinn and Riga, and I'll try literally anything once - even sheep's head or rattlesnake.
So what changed?
My attitude to travel, for one. After a few trips in my late teens/early twenties where I pretty much exclusively ordered chicken and fries regardless of the country I was in, I realised that I was missing out on a wonderful opportunity to immerse myself in the local culture. By visiting tourist restaurants alone, I was barely ever interacting with actual locals, and if you'd asked me what the local dishes and flavours of a country were, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. Thankfully, I've since discovered how much you can learn about history, culture and society simply from the food on your plate: and even if you don't always end up loving what you're served up, it's still just as valuable and entertaining as any conventional sightseeing you might do!
I can vividly remember the trip that changed my attitude to eating abroad, and it's quite apt that it was Hungary that made me hungry for more authentic food experiences while travelling! On this trip and many others since, Patrick (my husband) and I have learned some very important food-travel lessons which I want to share in this post!
I'll begin with a seemingly obvious - yet often overlooked! - reminder.
Get off-the-beaten-track for cheap, local food
We left the capital of Budapest and took a train to Eger, a town famous for its wine cellars built right into the hills, romantically named the Valley of the Beautiful Women. When we arrived at the valley, which was a few kilometres' walk from the town itself, we found it quiet and more or less tourist-free. We spent the next few hours getting a much-needed wake-up call regarding how cheap food and drink can be once you leave the tourist hubs, drinking delicious local glasses of wine for less than a euro each, and huge plates piled with meat and local cheese for just two or three euros.
We couldn't believe we'd never done this before. We remembered the time we'd visited Rome and spent most of our trip eating pizza and badly-made spaghetti carbonara in the same few restaurants on the main tourist drag. We even celebrated our anniversary with a forgettable pizza at a restaurant that also served - bizarrely - tiki cocktails. Now, there's nothing wrong with enjoying the odd pizza, of course, but if only we'd known what else lay out there! We're still desperate to get back to Italy together for a do-over.
Getting off-the-beaten-track doesn't have to entail a train journey to a lesser-known town, of course. It can simply mean doing a little online research into where the locals live - spoilers: it's not by the Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum or the Charles Bridge - and heading there for a meal instead. As a general rule of thumb, any restaurant that has a host out front to entice tourists to come inside is probably a tourist trap. Local-owned and local-loved restaurants don't need to resort to gimmicks to win customers: they let the reviews and word-of-mouth speak for themselves.
Research local specialties before you travel
Never again will we travel to a new place without a good idea of local dishes and ingredients. Never again will we hunt out 'western' food or chain restaurants...I mean, why exactly is there a Hard Rock Cafe in every major city in the world, anyway?? Instead, before we set off on our travels we put a few hours into researching the local specialties of a county or region, and then formulate a foodie bucket list based on this research. Some questions you should seek to answer before you travel are:
-What is the country's national dish(es)?
This will be the first dish we try and tick off our bucket list, no matter how strange it might be...it would be a missed opportunity, otherwise! Our favourite national dishes we've sampled have included Japan's curry rice, Thailand's pad thai, Germany's sauerbraten, and Belgian moules-frites.
-Are different regions of the country characterised by different types of dishes?
When road-tripping through America, for example, it would be simplistic to assume that burgers and hotdogs are the only things to eat. The south has its own soul-food culture of BBQ, cornbread, po'boys, biscuits, grits and more, while New York is the home of pastrami, bagels and food carts, and San Francisco has a vibrant Asian food scene. Likewise, in Italy, every region has its own specialty dish: trying bolognese is perfect in Bologna, carbonara is just the thing to try in Rome, and Venice has its own unique and ancient seafood-influenced cuisine.
-What ingredients are local to the area?
For example, if a region is known for its seafood, try to find out what seafood is caught locally, to make sure you're getting the catch-of-the-day and not an imported, frozen mystery fish! We made this mistake once - and only once! - on the Croatian island of Korcula, when we forgot to plan ahead and ended up at a restaurant serving freezer-burned fish. We could have done so much better: we were surrounded by a sea full of fresh fish, after all! Try to pick restaurants recognised for their use of fresh, locally-sourced ingredients.
But how exactly do you pick a restaurant that will truly do justice to local dishes and fresh ingredients? Read on to find out!
Plan your meals in advance
One of the most exhausting aspects of travelling for us used to be hunting down somewhere to eat. You’re usually already hungry, but you don’t want to take a chance on just any old restaurant, so you find yourself traipsing around for far too long until your stomach starts to grumble too loudly for you to ignore and you find yourself submitting to the nearest English-menu-toting host beckoning you into a generic-looking ‘ristorante’ with the promise of overdone burgers or an all-you-can-eat pasta bar. It's okay, we’ve all been there.
Instead, do your research in advance to filter out the tourist traps, and make a reservation whenever you can: many local favourites often require at least a week’s advance booking, so don’t delay! Being the foodies that we are, we can often spend hours researching the best local dishes and where to eat them: but at least I can do it from the comfort of my living room before I travel, so that when we arrive at the restaurant we’re refreshed and excited, rather than frazzled and ready for the night to be over!
Some research sources are more helpful than others. I usually use a combination of at least two or three of the below before making my final decisions. I like corroboration, okay?
-Tripadvisor. First off, be wary of Tripadvisor: I’ve started noticing that the top-rated restaurants in any given city are often not the best, but simply the most-visited, pushed to the top by the sheer number of decent-but-not-glowing reviews. They can often be victims of their own hype, so don’t be afraid to look at less-reviewed restaurants, too! One way to avoid the hype issue is to filter restaurants by cuisine type (e.g. fine dining, cheap eats, brunch, Japanese....) to beat the popularity algorithm: there are hundreds of categories to choose from, and we’ve had some truly memorable meals this way!
-Google Maps Reviews. This is great for filtering restaurants by location, via Google Maps. Find out where the coolest areas of a city are, and use it to pull up restaurants in those areas. You can then scroll through Google Maps nearby suggestions and look at ratings and reviews. I discovered some of my favourite restaurants in my home town of Cologne this way, stumbling upon local favourites that barely get any recognition on the tourist review-heavy Tripadvisor!
-Spotted by Locals. Another great website for finding local favourites, as implied by its name! Locals self-submit only the restaurants they would personally recommend. I often use it after browsing Tripadvisor, to see if the locals like a place as much as the tourists do!
-Lonely Planet. I trust Lonely Planet more than most other travel guides out there (and I’m not just biased because they’ve published my photos in the past, I promise!). Their recommendations usually focus on really well-established, quality restaurants, including those in the Michelin Guide. As a result, they’re not always the cheapest...but they’re always, always good. Just search your destination on the main page and then navigate to the 'where to eat' section.
-2 Food Trippers. These guys know their food, and they seem to have been everywhere and eaten everything. Their blog is so invaluable as an introduction to the local specialties of a place, as well as recommending exactly where to eat them and how to score reservations. I constantly aspire to be as well-food-travelled as these two!
-The Michelin Guide. Michelin-starred restaurants often come with a reputation for snobbery, but this really isn't the case at all! We've only eaten at one Michelin-starred restaurant that was a little on the stuffy side, but all the others have been warm, welcoming and often exciting and innovative. Our favourite was L'Esquisse in Annecy, France. Plus, the Michelin Guide isn't just for locating Michelin-starred restaurants: the majority of the restaurants listed in the guide don't have an elusive star, but their place in the guide guarantees their quality every time.
And while we're on the subject of supposedly 'fancy' dining....
Try a Tasting Menu
A tasting menu is a meal that offers you a set selection of courses chosen and created by the chef to showcase their culinary style. You don't get to choose these, although there will be a chance to flag up any dietary restrictions. They can range from around five or six courses to upwards of ten and, as such, each course will be smaller to make sure you have room for them all. They are usually intricately presented, with a focus on aesthetic as well as taste. Most also have the option of a course-by-course drink pairing, for an additional price.
Our discovery of the benefits of a tasting menu also happened during our Hungarian 'foodie awakening' trip. Still in Eger, we visited local favourite Macok, a restaurant offering a six-course tasting menu for the mind-bogglingly cheap price of less than 30 euros. We've never had such a colourful and vibrant meal since, a celebration of fresh locally-sourced ingredients. It taught us that tasting menus are an ideal way to try dishes that we wouldn't usually consider ordering: for instance, some of our favourite tasting menu courses have involved seafood, which we never usually tend to order off the menu as an individual course. More fool us.
We've had so many wonderful and memorable tasting menus since our trip to Hungary. They can sometimes be pricey: our ultimate dream would be the outrageously-priced "best meal in the world" at Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, but its 300 euro price tag puts it well of our reach! But they don't always have to be expensive! We've had some great-value meals, especially in countries that are generally cheaper for travellers (such as in Eastern Europe and northern Africa) and since the focus is on slow dining, savouring every mouthful and really taking the time to enjoy good company as well as experiencing a story told through food, 40 to 50 euros for three-plus hours of dining isn't all that crazy when you stop and think about it!
Aside from Macok, some of our favourite tasting menu experiences have included:
-Being treated like royalty and spectacularly overfed at Riad Kniza in Marrakech
-Being told a culinary story over the course of three hours at Cochon de Luxe in Ghent, Belgium
-An exciting and creative 11-course Portuguese meal at Cave 23 in Lisbon
-A modern twist on Japanese omakase (chef's choice) at Adana in Seattle
-An entire menu served on spoons at The Artist in Bucharest, Romania
-Pretty much every meal we had in Paris....because we just had to make the most of being in one of the culinary capitals of the world!
Embark on a food tour
Want to try a range of dishes but not necessarily all at the same restaurant? Then a food tour is the perfect choice. These typically involve at least four or five foodie stops, and come with several benefits:
-You get to feel a little like a celebrity with your express, skip-the line access to popular eating spots
-Your guide will filter the worthwhile foodie spots from the ones to avoid, so you don't have to
-A food tour serves as an orientation to the local cuisine, allowing you to return to your favourite spots the next day, with confidence
-At each destination, you'll try quintessentially local dishes while learning the history behind them
-As you move from stop to stop, you'll get a guided history/culture tour thrown in for nothing!
You can probably tell that I'm a huge fan of food tours. We don't often book traditional guided tours when we travel, preferring to explore at our own pace, but in our experience food tours have really enriched our understanding of a place and its culture. We also really love being able to support local businesses through these tours.
Secret Food Tours is one of our favourite companies for this: our tour of the Mission District in San Francisco brought us to an area that tourists are often afraid to explore, yet the food on offer there rivals the rest of the city. Here's the post I wrote about this fascinating combination of great food, history and social commentary.
Another really solid choice for food tours is AirBnB Experiences. While sites like Get Your Guide allow guides to list tours, they're rarely reviewed and often out-of-date. AirBnB is a much more reassuring choice, with up-to-date reviews and a great range of options. We used the site to book a tour of Tokyo's Tsukiji Market, and I also found an absolutely fantastic street food tour of Venice when I took a recent solo trip there.
Try a self-guided food tour
Of course, if you prefer to be independent when you travel, there's always the option for a self-guided food tour. This can take several different forms.
Option 1: Do your research and compile a bucket list of all the local foods you want to try. Then figure out where to try them, using some of the useful sites I listed above. Compiling your list will likely be time-consuming, but by the time you're ready to take your trip you'll practically be an expert on local cuisine! I took this approach when planning our three-week trip to Japan, compiling and ultimately ticking off everything on this Japanese food bucket list! I'm very glad I took the time to plan this, as I'd have regretted going all that way and missing out on some foodie gems! Street food kiosks, food carts, bakeries/patisseries, specialty stores (such as cheese or wine), and food markets are your best choices for a speedy, one day food tour.
Option 2: Let someone else do the research for you! There are companies that offer pre-paid self-guided food tours, in which you're given a pass with a list of participating local businesses: you simply show up at the ones that appeal to you and request your food tasting, which will be included in the initial price of the pass. We tried this in Paris with the company Le Food Trip, and really enjoyed being independent while getting to visit areas of the city that we'd never have discovered as tourists. Again, it was great getting to support local businesses! Another option is websites like WildBum, which offer guides made by travellers for travellers - they've already researched their own successful trips and want to pass on this information to you to save you time! Check out my WildBum Japanese food guide, for example, which includes a detailed bucket list of foods to try, and where to try them!
Visit a food market
Most popular cities - and plenty of lesser-known towns - will have at least one local food market. Some may simply offer fresh produce such as fruit, veg and meat, but others offer ready-to-eat snacks or even full meals. They're a great way to get a crash-course on a city's food scene, not to mention being an ideal choice for casual diners and solo travellers alike: I often feel uncomfortable sitting down for a formal restaurant meal when I'm travelling alone, so grazing my way through a market and chatting to the vendors is the perfect compromise!
Some of my favourite market experiences so far have been:
-Ordering the salmorejo sampling platter at Cordoba's Mercato Victoria and impressing the vendor by managing to eat the whole thing!
-Sampling cured meats at Barcelona's famous La Bocqueria market
-Buying locally-made cheese and meat from a little market in the sleepy Burgundy village of Semur-en-Auxois, and then making up our own charcuterie platter back at our AirBnB
-Getting far too full on Asian food and donuts at London's historic Old Spitalfields Market
-Meeting the giant tuna at Tokyo's Tsukiji Market
-Trying the infamous octopus-on-a-stick at Kyoto's Nishiki Market
-Getting day-drunk on Burgundy wine at Les Halles Market in Dijon
-Exploring the souks of Marrakech and trying couscous, olives and sheep's head with a guide
-Watching the fish go flying through the air at Seattle's iconic Pike Place Market
-Warming up with mulled wine at myriad Christmas markets in Germany, France, Latvia, Estonia, Austria and the UK
Cook for yourself
One thing we try and do at least once on every trip is to get acquainted with the local supermarket, but not just to buy pre-made snacks and stuff we can find at home: instead, we
research a local dish, buy the ingredients, and get cooking. Why bother cooking while you're travelling, you ask? Well, specialty ingredients that might be expensive or difficult to source in your home country can be bought freely and cheaply when you're travelling, so why not take advantage of this and cook up something as authentically as possible? Of course, you'll need to rent accommodation with a decent kitchen - we usually use either AirBnB or the apartment listings on Booking.com for this - but this is the perfect way to spend an evening after a tiring day of sightseeing!
Cook with a class
Don't trust your own culinary skills? Try following someone else's instructions at a live cooking class, instead! I've only ever taken one cooking class - I learned to cook pad thai, green curry, spring rolls and sticky rice with mango in Thailand - but I've never forgotten it: it was so much fun and the sense of achievement you get from successfully cooking a country's most beloved dishes really is worth the effort!
These can be found easily through a Google search, but be sure to compare a few different options, for both price and positive reviews, before making a decision. Alternatively, AirBnB Experiences is once again a reliable source for well-reviewed cooking classes!
Eating well doesn't have to stop when you get home
So you're home from your travels and settling back into your daily routine, but for some reason you sometimes still have pangs of longing for that incredible ramen you had in Tokyo or that ceviche you devoured in Peru. We've been there too, but it was only recently that we decided to do something about it! During the Great Pandemic Lockdown of 2020, Patrick and I decided to try flexing our adventurous cooking skills, beginning a round-the-world cooking project, where we aim to cook a traditional dish from a different country every week. We try to source our ingredients from specialist stores to make sure they're the real deal, such as the Asia Markt near where we live in Cologne. However, if a recipe calls for a spice that really can't be sourced locally, the internet has lots of substitution suggestions that taste more-or-less the same as the original!
Sometimes, when we need a little help, we turn to Air BnB Experiences, who are currently offering some great online cooking classes because of the Covid-19 pandemic. So far, we've made a Japanese okonomiyaki that reminded us of the real thing we had in Hiroshima (it's in the bottom right corner of the image above!), created a silky-smooth Lebanese hummus thanks to our host's secret trick, and live-tasted Argentinian wines with a sommelier. Hopefully these online experiences continue even after the travel industry slowly gets back to normal!
And, most importantly of all, be open-minded!
Eating well when travelling is all about trying things you wouldn't normally opt for at home. Don't be afraid to say 'yes' to anything and everything you're offered! Turning down half of a country's local dishes is like hanging up a half-finished souvenir painting in your home...you're only getting half the story! The chances are, you won't have tried anything like it before, so you don't have a frame of reference....and you might end up absolutely loving it! I never would have discovered how much I love beef tartare if I'd listened to the voice in my head screaming "Raw meat? No way!", and I certainly wouldn't be the appreciator of octopus that I am now if I'd fallen back on my usual excuse of "No thanks, I'm not really a seafood fan"!
Anyway, what's the worst that can happen? I wasn't a fan of sheep's tongue when I tried it in Morocco, but did it kill me? Of course not. If you don't like what you've tried after a few bites, just stop eating it and move on to the next food adventure!
Now, if you've made it this far, please enjoy this spectacularly awkward photo of me in Japan, discovering that octopus actually tastes quite good.
As you can probably tell, making the decision to eat consciously has completely revolutionised the way that we travel. And we'd never go back to the way things were before. I hope that this post has inspired you to become travel foodies too, as well as offering some guidance about how to make your food adventures happen!
And sorry if I've made you hungry!
Bon appetit!
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