Food & Flavour

Culinary travel is widely sold as a list of restaurants and is almost never actually about them. What makes food travel worth the flight is much simpler and much harder to arrange: eating a thing in the place it comes from, in the season it belongs to, at the meal it is meant for, and often in the kind of establishment that does only that one dish. A famous city restaurant can be excellent and still tell you less about a country than a market at seven in the morning, a roadside place with one thing on the menu, or a home kitchen. The skill this page is trying to teach is knowing which of those to look for.

Three habits do most of the work. Eat regionally rather than nationally, because almost no country has one cuisine and the interesting differences are internal — the same dish is made differently three hundred kilometres away and locals will tell you so at length. Eat at the right time, because in much of the Mediterranean, Latin America and South Asia the serious meal is lunch and the traveller who only eats dinner is systematically getting the weaker half. And go where the specialists are: in many food cultures the best version of a dish is made by a place that has made nothing else for forty years, which is never the place with the longest menu.

Japan pushes the single-dish principle further than anywhere else on earth. The best version of almost anything is made by a small place that makes only that — one noodle, one grill, one style of sushi — often by the same family for generations, with a counter for eight or ten people and no menu to speak of. That is the real Japanese food experience, and it is more available and less expensive than its reputation suggests: department-store food halls, market stalls and standing counters are where a great deal of the best eating happens.

At the top of the scale, kaiseki is the country's formal cuisine and is best understood as a seasonal argument rather than a meal — a long sequence of small dishes chosen by what is at its peak that fortnight, usually eaten at a ryokan as part of the evening rather than in a restaurant. The counters worth planning a trip around seat a handful of people, run one or two sittings and are spoken for months ahead, so if one matters to you it is booked before the flights. Osaka is the country's most enjoyable eating city and the least formal, Kyoto is where the refined tradition lives, and Tokyo simply has more of everything than anywhere else.

The honest caveat for Indian travellers. Japanese cooking uses fish stock very widely, including in dishes that look vegetarian, so dashi is the thing to ask about specifically rather than assuming. Vegetarian eating is entirely possible — the Buddhist temple tradition of shojin ryori is genuinely vegetarian and is one of the best meals in the country — but it needs to be arranged rather than found by wandering. Have your requirements noted on the booking and ask us to confirm them with each property in advance.

Italy is the country where eating regionally matters most, because there is no Italian cuisine — there are twenty, and they disagree. Rome is offal, pecorino and four canonical pastas; Florence and Tuscany are bread, beans, olive oil and beef; Venice is the lagoon, which means seafood, rice and cicchetti rather than anything you would recognise as Italian food from a menu abroad; the south is tomato, chilli and the best vegetables in Europe. Travelling three regions properly beats travelling ten cities, and Italy is also the easiest great food country in the world for vegetarians.

Spain runs on a completely different clock — lunch in the middle of the afternoon, dinner late — and its best eating is standing up, moving between bars, which is a way of eating rather than a meal. Barcelona and the Basque country are the two poles of it. Turkey is the most underrated food country of the four and one of the most rewarding for Indian travellers, because bread, pulses, yoghurt, vegetables and grilled meat are the backbone and the spicing is familiar enough to be comfortable and different enough to be interesting. Greece is the simplest of them, which is the point: a very few excellent ingredients treated with restraint, best on the islands in spring and autumn.

Thailand is arguably the best-value great food country on earth, and the essential thing to understand is regional: the north is milder, herbal and Burmese-influenced; the north-east is fiery, sour and built on sticky rice and fermented fish; the centre is the sweet-sour-salty balance most people mean by Thai food; the south is coconut, turmeric and serious heat. Eating well there means eating in markets and at street stalls, and a cooking class early in the trip is one of the genuinely high-value things to do, because it teaches you what you are tasting for the remaining ten days.

Vietnam is the more refined and the more regionally divided of the two, and it is best travelled north to south precisely because the food changes as you go: the north is subtle, broth-led and lightly seasoned; the centre is the imperial cuisine, more complex and considerably spicier; the south is sweeter, more tropical, more abundant. Breakfast is the great Vietnamese meal and the traveller who sleeps through it is missing the best of the country. Both nations are straightforward for vegetarians in the cities and require more care in the countryside, chiefly because fish sauce is in almost everything — which is the specific thing to ask about, in the same way dashi is in Japan.

Four more that reward a traveller who has done the obvious ones. Mexico has one of the world's great cuisines and almost nothing to do with what is sold under its name elsewhere: corn, chillies, moles of real complexity, and a market culture that is the point of going. Peru is the most interesting food country in the Americas, built on an extraordinary range of altitudes and on Japanese and Chinese immigration that produced entire hybrid cuisines. Morocco is slow cooking, preserved lemon and spice blends, and it is unusually easy for vegetarians. Georgia is the outlier worth knowing about — an ancient wine culture, a table tradition built around hospitality, and a repertoire of walnut, herb and cheese dishes that is superb for vegetarians and almost unknown outside the region.

And it is worth saying that some of the best food travel available to an Indian reader is domestic. Karaikudi and the Chettinad region, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi and the Malabar coast, and Udupi are each as distinct from one another as any two European countries, and each can be travelled without a flight, a visa or a single question about what is in the stock. A food-led trip through two Indian regions is a more serious culinary education than a week of restaurants abroad.

For precision and craft: Japan. Book one counter months ahead, let the rest be markets, food halls and single-dish shops, and accept that vegetarian eating needs arranging rather than finding.

For abundance and ease: Italy, in two or three regions rather than ten cities. The best combination of great food, simple logistics and genuine vegetarian range anywhere on this page, and the easiest to enjoy without any planning at all.

For value and intensity: Thailand or Vietnam. The most food per rupee in the world, a cooking class on day two, and the street rather than the restaurant. Ask about fish sauce and you will eat extremely well.

For something nobody at home has done: Georgia, Peru or Mexico. All three are genuinely great and none is obvious, and Georgia in particular is remarkable for vegetarians.

For depth without a passport: Chettinad, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Malabar or coastal Karnataka. No visa, no dietary anxiety, and regional differences as sharp as any in Europe. Our food and culture guide goes further into how to eat in each.

This is the section that decides whether a food-led trip abroad works, and it is usually reduced to a footnote. The first principle is that "vegetarian" does not travel as a word. In much of Southeast Asia fish sauce is a base seasoning rather than an ingredient anyone would list; in Japan fish stock is in dishes that look entirely vegetable; in parts of Europe animal fat, gelatine and anchovy appear where you would not expect them. So the useful question is never "is this vegetarian" but the specific one — is there fish sauce, is there dashi, is there stock, is there lard — asked about the dish rather than the menu.

The second principle is to have it established in advance rather than negotiated at the table. Tell your travel designer your requirements — vegetarian, Jain, halal, allergies — at the time of enquiry, and ask for them to be noted on every hotel, flight and arranged meal, with confirmation from each property before you travel. Jain requirements in particular should never be assumed to follow from vegetarian, and halal should never be assumed from anything; both need to be confirmed specifically, by name, for each place. Carry a written card in the local language for the things you do not eat; it works far better than a conversation and removes the ambiguity entirely.

Three practical habits for the rest. Eat street food where there is a queue of locals and high turnover, which is a better hygiene signal than appearance, and be more careful with raw salads, ice and unpeeled fruit than with cooked food. Take a cooking class in the first two days rather than the last, because everything you eat afterwards makes more sense. And book the one or two places that genuinely need booking before anything else, then leave the rest of the trip open — the best meal you have will almost certainly be one you did not plan.