How to find local food when you are travelling

Start at a market, not at a meal

The single most useful hour of any food trip is the one you spend at a food market on the first morning, before you have eaten anything worth writing about. A market is a city's ingredient list, published daily, for free. Walk it before you make a single decision about where to eat and most of your later decisions get made for you.

You are not there to shop, although you should buy something. You are there to find out what this place actually has: which vegetables are piled high and cheap because they are in season right now, which fish keeps appearing, what the fat is, butter, olive oil, lard, ghee, palm oil, and what the acid is, because every cuisine has one and it is usually sitting in an unlabelled bottle nobody has bothered to explain.

Then look at what the market itself is eating. Nearly every serious market has a corner where the traders take breakfast at seven, and whatever they are eating is the local breakfast, at the local price, made by someone whose customers will complain immediately if it slips.

What a market tells you in ten minutes

• Volume equals season. The thing stacked in pyramids at the front of four different stalls is at its peak this week. The thing in a small, tidy, expensive pile is either just starting, just ending or imported.
• Repetition equals identity. Whatever appears on nearly every stall, a particular chilli, a herb, a cured pork product, a specific short-grain rice, is load-bearing in the local cooking. Buy some.
• Prepared food shows you the technique. Stalls selling something already cooked are showing you what home cooks cannot be bothered to make: the fiddly dumpling, the long-braised thing, the pastry with too many layers. That is a shortlist of dishes worth eating out.
• The butcher's counter shows you the cuts. A counter full of shins, cheeks and offal describes a braising culture. A counter of thin steaks and chops describes a fast, hot-pan culture. That tells you what to order later.
• The queue is data. One stall with a line at a market where nothing else has a line is worth ten minutes of your morning.

Buy fruit, bread, a piece of cheese or cured meat, and something you cannot identify. Ask what the last one is for, not what it is, what it is for. People answer that question far more generously.

How to tell where locals actually eat

Forget the folklore about avoiding anywhere with a view or with photographs on the menu. Some of it is true and some of it is snobbery, and none of it is as reliable as watching the room for ninety seconds.

Look at who is inside and what they are doing. A place full of people who arrived alone, who are not photographing anything, and who clearly did not have to think about ordering is a place with regulars. Regulars are the only endorsement that scales. A place where every table arrived at once, in groups, with luggage or shopping bags, is serving whoever walked past.

Then look at the menu's shape. A short menu that changes, or a handwritten insert, means somebody is cooking to what they bought. A laminated menu with ninety dishes across four cuisines means a freezer and a microwave, anywhere on earth. Translation into six languages is not automatically bad in a tourist city, but six languages plus ninety dishes plus somebody outside inviting you in is three signals at once, and three is enough.

The most reliable trick remains distance and time. Walk fifteen minutes away from whatever the main attraction is, and eat at the hour the locals eat rather than an hour before. Both cost you almost nothing and both change the room completely.

Ordering when you do not speak the language

Learn six things to say, not sixty. In practice you need: hello, please, thank you, what do you recommend, I do not eat, followed by whatever you genuinely cannot eat, and the bill. Six phrases, said badly, will carry an entire trip, and the effort itself changes how you are treated.

Then ask a better question. “What is good?” gets you the safe answer, because the person answering is guessing what a stranger wants. “What would you eat?” or “What is the thing people here order that visitors never do?” gets you something real. If you have any dietary restriction, write it down in the local language before you travel, on paper and on your phone, and show it rather than performing it: allergies in particular are too important to mime.

Eat on the local clock

More good meals are missed to bad timing than to bad choices. Eating hours are not a preference; they are when the kitchen is actually cooking, and arriving outside them puts you in the one place still open, which is rarely the best one.

The shape varies enormously. In much of France, lunch is the big meal and runs from around noon to two, kitchens shut for the afternoon, and dinner does not really start until eight. In Spain both meals slide considerably later. In much of Britain and the United States dinner is earlier and lunch is short. In a great many places the best street food is a breakfast phenomenon that has packed up by nine in the morning. Our Paris, London and New York pages set out those rhythms city by city.

Two practical consequences. First, the biggest meal of the day should be the one the city takes seriously, which very often means lunch rather than dinner. Second, find out which day things close, markets, family-run kitchens and food shops in many countries close a specific weekday, and discovering that at one in the afternoon on that day is a wasted meal.

What to actually avoid

• Anywhere with someone outside trying to bring you in. Kitchens with enough regulars do not need a recruiter on the pavement.
• Menus that cover several unrelated cuisines. Nobody has the larder to do that well.
• Eating your first meal at the airport, station or hotel out of exhaustion. It sets a low bar and it eats a meal slot you cannot get back. Buy something from a bakery or a market stall instead and hold out.
• Booking everything before you arrive. You have not seen the market yet, so you do not know what is good this week.
• Chasing a single famous dish for three days. The dish that is genuinely everywhere is usually the one worth eating five times; the one you have to cross a city for is usually a story rather than a meal.

Bring it home, or you will lose it

A trip's food is almost entirely forgotten within a month unless you do something deliberate. The fix is small: when something is good, write down three things while you are still at the table, what was in it, what the texture was, and what made it taste the way it did. Sour? Fermented? Smoked? Cooked in an animal fat? That note is what lets you rebuild the dish at home, and a photograph alone will never carry it.

Buy the shelf-stable version of the local flavour rather than a souvenir: the spice blend, the vinegar, the dried chilli, the rice. And save the posts, yours and other people's, into a named collection while the trip is still happening. That is precisely what collections in Foodies are for, a dish, who cooked it, and where you found it, still legible six months later. Then read our technique guides and cook the thing badly once; the second attempt is usually the one that works.

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