If you’ve ever hopped a plane for a sandwich, helicoptered to remotest New Zealand to snorkel for your dinner, or boarded an overnight train from New Orleans because you heard the dining car’s beef tenderloin is totally on point, this is the place for you. Here are 29 ways to get lost and fed:
Maybe you think you don’t want to work on vacation. But when you’re staying at Babylonstoren, tucked in the Cape Winelands outside Cape Town, you’d be wrong. To start, you can play farmhand on the hotel’s 1,400 breathtaking acres.
When you decide to set off on a 700-mile trip across northern Thailand with nothing but a couple of maps, sometimes the best thing to do is to let the terrain (and food) guide you. That’s what Tim McSweeney and his wife did on their honeymoon—here’s what they saw.
While many people’s daydreams involve swimming in blue-green waters, at BA we have visions of marble counters, six-burner ranges, kitchens overlooking the beach or the Eiffel Tower. If this is your dream too, skip the hotel and rent a home through one of these sites:
Airbnb: Click the “kitchen” filter and consult the website’s neighborhood guides to find a temporary home at any price point that’s a great base for cooking and for eating out. airbnb.com
Kid & Coe: Specializes in surprisingly chic kid-friendly rentals around the globe. Check the listing for bonuses like toys and high chairs.
kidandcoe.com
Welcome Beyond: Let the aspirational lodgings (think design-blog-famed kitchens or campfire-equipped yurts) determine your destination, not the other way around. welcomebeyond.com
—Belle Cushing
“Keep a disposable camera in your bag at all times, an off-brand variety whose iffy film may result in grainy, vintage-looking photos. There’s something truly special about having a limited number of exposures and making them really count. Return home from your hut on the beach in the Yucatán, drop off your film at the drugstore, then relive that magical (unedited) vacation all over again.” —Alison Roman
Some food-centric types chart their European vacations by referring to a constellation of Michelin stars and San Pellegrino 50 Best rankings. When I’m lucky enough to jet across the Atlantic, I try to get away from all that. And one can’t get much farther away than tiny Da Laura restaurant in San Fruttuoso, Italy. —Adam Rapoport
The most important thing I learned on Atlanta’s Buford Highway, a seven-mile stretch lined with a United Nations of restaurants, is that an epic appetite and a mind open to new flavors are the keys to a well-fed life. Next time you’re in Atlanta, head to Buford Highway (we call it BuHi) for a seat at the world’s table. —Andrew Knowlton
Romans are loyal to their local trattoria, and most wouldn’t bother making the trip to eat at one in another neighborhood—which is a shame, because I’d get on a plane right now to eat the pasta alla gricia at Da Cesare al Casaletto. —Carla Lalli Music
Get the recipe: Pasta alla Gricia
Even more: The Top 9 Plates of Pasta in Rome
Between Top Chef tapings, hitting the food-festival circuit, and more, chef Hugh Acheson spends much of his time far from his family in Athens, Georgia. In the past year, he’s hit upward of 30 cities, from Barcelona to Bentonville, Arkansas. How does this man on the move prepare for each trip? —Belle Cushing
If you want to feel like your grandparents did when they traveled—when the process of traversing a thousand miles was every bit as special as the fact of it—you’ll want to hop a train. A 1920s Pullman railcar to be precise, meticulously restored by Pullman Rail Journeys, a company eager to bring back the golden age of rail in all its kitschy glory. —Amiel Stanek
When Kris Yenbamroong, the chef of the popular Night + Market restaurants in L.A., goes back to Bangkok to visit relatives, the first thing he does is go outside. That’s because the city’s street food is the inspiration for much of his menu. He might spend an entire day trying different chicken wings, another savoring the smoky “wok flavor” that deepens a comforting bowl of noodles with chicken and egg. Yenbamroong takes notes on everything from the “boxing chicken”—named for the famous spatchcocked bird served at Likhit Gai Yang, a restaurant outside a boxing arena—to the turmeric-infused pork skewers from a vendor at the Patpong night market so he can bring their flavors back to all of us. Until you’re able to make the trip to Bangkok, here are Yenbamroong’s home cook–friendly recipes for his favorite dishes. —Christine Muhlke
Get the recipes: Thai Street Food
In 2011, I spent just about every morning drinking the $1.50 chai from Lahore Deli in NYC’s SoHo. I discovered it a year earlier after a night out. It was about three in the morning, and SoHo was desolate minus the cluster of yellow cabs situated in front of this small Pakistani joint on Crosby Street. At that moment, I swore off $4 cappuccinos and forever pledged allegiance to Lahore’s silky chai. —Elizabeth Jamie Oscoff
Get the recipe: Lahore Deli's Chai
Phone, boarding pass, government-issued ID—and your water bottle. These are the things you should always have when you travel. The stylish standby we rely on to save us from overpriced airport bottles ripe for the confiscating (not to mention disease-ridden taps and streams once we get to our far-flung destinations) is the Vapur MicroFilter ($70). It’s collapsible, it’s self-filtering—and, yes, it’s 70 bucks, but think of what you’ll save in terms of plastic and trips to the hospital for a giardia infection. Drink up. —Belle Cushing
Photos: Per-Anders Jorgensen
Located in the bucolic town of Skåne-Tranås in southern Sweden, Daniel Berlin (which is the name of both the restaurant and the chef) [elegantly reinvigorates the farm-to-table genre](<a href=). —Lisa Abend
Australian chefs are on the world’s radar in a big way, thanks in no small part to their experimentation with indigenous ingredients. —David Prior
When I travel abroad, breakfast truly is the most important meal. If I skipped it, I’d miss out on the foods that make each place distinct: stuffed arepas in Venezuela, pho in Vietnam, broiled mackerel over rice alongside a bowl of miso soup in Japan, feta and dried sausage in Turkey, or a dosa with coconut chutney in India (shown here). These are always the simplest, most authentic, and memorable meals of any distant trip. So, jet lag be damned, I always get out of bed, walk the sleepy streets, grab a newspaper, and eat the breakfast of champions—whatever and wherever that may be. —Andrew Knowlton
Last winter I spent a week in Istanbul and I found ambitious chefs expanding the city’s food vocabulary with New Turkish Cuisine (think olive oil–braised fennel with fava purée); back-alley kebabs that were still reliably awesome; and, if you knew where to look, a well-poured cocktail. —Matt Gross
The first time I visited Ireland, I subsisted on charmless pub stews, dull dark bread, and supermarket cheese—all the while wondering, Where, in this greener-than-green land where dairy cows roam the cliffsides, is the real food? The answer, I learned three years later: It’s at Ballymaloe, where the back-to-basics approach to cooking and farming felt, well, revolutionary. —Matt Gross
Six landjäger sausages, a bottle of wine, and a full day’s climb later, we finally glimpsed it: this insane structure literally stuck into the side of a cliff. —Elias Cairo, as told to Amiel Stanek
Ben Schott, author of Schott’s Original Miscellany, offers up his essential etiquette for the globe-trotting gourmand.
If there’s a more refreshing summer dish than ceviche, I haven’t had it. It’s bracingly acidic, redolent of fresh cilantro, and as clean as the pristinely fresh sea bass you just picked up at the fish market. As anyone worth her passport stamps will tell you, if you want the best in the world, you hop a plane to Peru. You go straight to Central Restaurante in Lima, where Virgilio Martínez crafts versions that are wildly creative yet hew to traditional techniques.
And you know what? Ceviche is not hard to make. Sure, yours won’t look this stunning (sorry, it just won’t), but if you buy the choicest white fish, follow Martínez’s advice for blending the leche de tigre (the key to authentic Peruvian ceviche), and dress the fish just moments before serving it—more of a kiss than a soak—you’ll feel like you’re in Peru, no matter where you are in the States. —Adam Rapoport
Read more: Making Fresh Ceviche at Home Is Way Easier Than It Looks
Get the recipe: Sea Bass and Tomato Ceviche
I’d made the journey to New Zealand’s remote Fiordland coast in search of empty waves—the sort of waves that exist only in places you have to either helicopter to or hike to for five days. Within an hour of arriving, I was ready to paddle out. But instead of handing me a board, my host, Warrick Mitchell, handed me a snorkel. —Warrick Cockrell
One of the ironies of ’gramming everything we eat and drink? We tend to forget the actual experience because we’re so busy filtering our pics and adding clever text. So by all means snap pictures—but post them after the meal. If you’re preoccupied with “likes” during dinner, how can you even remember the food? —Belle Cushing
Some people travel to Tokyo to make their dreams of Jiro sushi a reality. Some go to slurp as many bowls (and styles) of ramen as possible. Others go for the street fashion of Harajuku or simply to experience how 13 million people live crammed together so damn peacefully. Me? I went to drink. —Andrew Knowlton
When traveling, if you want to understand how the locals eat, you’ve got to try their version of stuff stuffed into other stuff. —Amiel Stanek
Is Rose’s Fine Food a diner? Let’s look at the facts: The space, on a decidedly not-hip main drag on Detroit’s east side, has been a diner on and off for decades (cousins Lucy Carnaghi and Molly Mitchell leased it, coffee cups and all, last July). The menu, with its bacon and pancakes and fried fish sandwiches, can read like a truck stop’s. —David Tamarkin
Food nerds abroad should always add “Walk the aisles of the grocery store” to their itinerary. The ordinariness of the setting, combined with the volume of things I’ll never see at Safeway, is irresistible, even if it’s just towers of Bimbo bread in Mexico City or colorful tins of cockles in Barcelona. And all that crazy-brilliant packaging means that a trip to the supermarket doubles as a souvenir-gathering excursion. —Carla Lalli Music
Have you ever gazed at a tropical screen saver, waiting for your ten precious vacation days to roll around? I used to. And then I realized I needed to do something big, something drastic. So I quit my job and set off on a yearlong 16-country tour throughout Asia. —Ashlea Halpern
Why take your family to France or Florida when you could pack them into a minivan with a stranger in Morocco? Novelist Michael Chabon explains.
Air travel isn’t easy these days. Restaurant and drinks editor Andrew Knowlton does a lot of it, for restaurant scouting and food events like Expo Milano. These are the travel essentials that keep him sane and comfortable during his frequent travels.