How To Widen Your Travel Cuisine Palate
People travel around this weird world of ours for all kinds of reasons. Some want to see the beautiful vistas they can’t get anywhere else, some chase better weather, others love absorbing culture, and some might just want to say that they’ve travelled around every continent in the world. Of course, these aren’t hard categories; you likely have a range of reasons you wish to travel, and none of them are mutually exclusive. We’re only on this odd planet for a short amount of time, so why not see what’s out there?
Yet it’s also true to say that perhaps one of the most universal purposes to travel, if not the primary one, is that of being exposed to great food. You need to eat when abroad, so you might a well eat nice food which, thankfully, most cultures have absolutely perfected over centuries of experimentation and making use of the natural bounty around them.
It’s a real shame to find yourself eating at the chain restaurants like McDonalds when in different countries. So how can you widen your travel cuisine palette? In this post, we’ll discuss this and more.
Visit Authentic Restaurants
It’s a good idea to visit authentic restaurants, but not just restaurants that claim to celebrate a culture. The restaurants that are actively manned by people who have deep knowledge or cultural background in a certain style of food can be tremendously helpful for the overall propagation and creation of this cuisine. You’ll know the difference between eating sushi in a restaurant that prioritises excellent seafood compared to a restaurant that has this as a second priority.
Go To The Source
Getting to the source of a fantastic food type, and seeing its natural sourcing and presentation carefully constructed with reverence can be … well, reverent. For instance, Barilla Bay and its amazing overview of their oyster farm will show you exactly why this most fresh of seafood dining experiences is incomparable to other restaurants that ship their mainstay ingredients from elsewhere. There’s nothing quite as immediate and beautiful as eating food this fresh, as well as learning the history and the craft of such a place. An eye for authenticity is your stomach’s greatest friend.
Take Your Time
It’s very easy to think that once you want to focus on ‘the best cuisine,’ you need to visit every single restaurant and tour every single establishment at once. But that’s not the case. Food is meant to be savoured, sometimes with repeat trips to a place, sometimes when heading to a restaurant but also when bringing ingredients home from the local market and trying to craft a dish yourself. There’s no test to pass here, nor anyone to tell you exactly how you should eat. Just enjoy the culture, because that’s the ultimate act of appreciating food. Even master chefs would prefer you just enjoy and appreciate the food rather than knowing every single thing about it in the span of a week.
With this advice, we hope you can widen your travel cuisine palette but also have fun.