If you’re like me, one of the main reasons you travel is for the food. Sure, the Berlin Wall is cool but it’s not as tasty as the kebab down the street. A good meal can make or break a travel day but in very touristy locales, it can be hard to suss out which places are tourist traps or overhyped. Here are a few tricks I use to find the best restaurants when I travel:
🙋‍♀️ Ask locals
This is by far the number one tip I can offer. Locals know all the best secret food spots and which ones have food that looks better on Instagram. If you don’t know a local, I recommend asking around on Reddit or in travel groups on Facebook. I find that the people on those two sites are far more reliable than the food content you see on Instagram. Also, once I’m in a new place, I’m never shy to ask my taxi driver or the barista at the coffee shop what their favorite in the city are. People love to talk food and I’ve never been steered wrong.
📸 Use Instagram (but only a certain way)
Food is a very visual experience so it’s no wonder that Instagram has become foodie central. I follow a lot of food bloggers both there and on TikTok, but I often find that a lot of content is manufactured and I begin to wonder how much people got paid to write about a certain restaurant. I still use IG to look for yummy food spots, but I try to only take advice from people with smaller accounts. If I see someone has a ton of followers and the rest of their posts look sponsored, I just don’t trust the food reviews as much. For example, this is one of my favorite LA food Instagram pages.
It’s a group of friends with a small following and their recommendations have never led me astray.
I also use the hashtag and location features to look for food more than anything. I’ll look through posts under the “Seattle” location tag, for instance, and then save good food ones that come up. Or I’ll look up hashtags like “#Seattlefoodies” or “#SeattleEats” and see what pops. I hit the save button and organize them by city in my IG saved folder so that I can look back on them for reference.
👩‍💻 Research through food blogs
This is my best-kept secret but I’m happy to share it with all our loyal readers. I think social media sites like IG are a great place to start but if you really want to find the best food spots, you have to stop the endless doom scroll and take it to the food blogs. It’s as simple as typing something in as “Hawaii food blog” or “Where I ate in Hawaii” into Google and you’ll find endless sites.
This is how I found out about a place in Honolulu that wasn’t listed on Google, doesn’t allow photos, and the chef designs every table a four-course custom menu of Thai food at very affordable prices. I still think about that meal to this day, but sadly the restaurant has since closed down. Most of my truly unforgettable dining
experiences have been because I’ve read just a few blogs from people who love food as much as I do.Â
🍴 Food markets
Whenever I’m in a bigger city, I do a quick search to see if they have any food markets. I often find that there are a lot of markets with gourmet levels of food stands of some of the most popular places in the city. I like to go do a quick sample of some places all in one convenient spot. I also enjoy eating at markets a lot when I’m solo traveling. They are much more welcoming environments and don’t leave me feeling awkward at a table for one as the slow service drags my meal out to the three-hour mark. I’m in and I’m out with a full belly. One of my favorite food markets so far has been the TimeOut Market in Lisbon for a quick breakfast and the Mercato Centrale in Florence where they have everything from traditional pizza and pasta to delectable dumplings.Â
🍝 Sign up for a food tour or cooking class
Food reveals so much about a place’s culture and history. I love to sign up for food or cooking tours through Tripadvisor and Airbnb because they can be a window into another world. My rule of thumb is that I look for tour guides and chefs who are locals so I can pick their brains for even more food information that I’m always hungry for.
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