Travel = Life = Food: a World of Travel Food Adventures

My wife chows down on squid at a street market in Thailand

It is just simple math.

If travel = life (which I believe it does), and life = food (which I believe it does), then by the transitive property travel = food. And for me and my family, nothing could be more true. We travel, in a very large part, to eat.

From Small Town Ohio to New York City

My wife and I both grew up in a small town in central Ohio. Food in good old Pickerington, Ohio, was not exactly what you would call exotic. Or varied. Or good. We had Little Caesar’s Pizza and Taco Bell, but my wife didn’t try Chinese food until she went to college.

My wife and I really began to explore new foods when we moved to New York City. Thai food, Indian food, Ethiopian food, Italian food that wasn’t spaghetti or pizza, not to mention oodles and oodles of Chinese. We loved it all. We were young and broke, but that didn’t stop us from sniffing out every little hole-in-the-wall joint we could get to. We had a great time getting a hands-on education in the art of eating.

Teaching Our Kids to Love Good Food

NYC Pizza at Patsy's Pizzeria

Fast forward a decade and a half, and we were getting ready to take our three daughters to New York for the first time. When my wife and I go to the city, we go to eat. Everything else we do is just to kill time digesting before the next meal. But taking three kids with us to do an eating tour of New York would be expensive. Did we really want to shell out the money it would cost to take our kids to eat at our favorite restaurants every night? Would the kids appreciate it? We would be able to save a rather large amount of money by feeding the kids cold cereal for breakfast, street hot dogs for lunch, and hamburgers for dinner.

My wife and I talked it over and finally decided that we wanted to teach our kids about good food. We looked at the cost of a good meal the same way we looked at spending money to visit a museum or go to the theater. Eating is entertainment.

So we took our kids to Momofuku Ssam Bar (sadly now closed) and the Fatty Crab (sadly now closed). We embarked on what we called "the Day of Seven Lunches" where we walked around lower Manhattan, going to seven different establishments, ordering what that place was famous for, and sharing. We were stuffed to the gills by the end of the seventh lunch, but the kids still talk about that day as a favorite.

Food at NYC's the Fatty Crab was amazing. The world suffered a terrible loss when it closed permanently

The kids loved the food we had on that trip so we have kept taking them out to the places we like to go. And the great thing is that my wife and I can look back on that trip and our plan to teach the kids to love good food and see that our plan worked! My kids are awesome for a large number of reasons, but their appreciation of great food is one of the things that makes them really interesting.

Eating Brains and Tails: A Proud Moment

One of my proud moments came a couple of years ago when we all went to Animal (now sadly closed--hmm . . . there seems to be an unfortunate theme here) while in LA. Animal was famous for "nose to tail" cooking, which means they served all parts of the animal. We ordered veal brains, and pig ears and tails, and chicken liver. Not only were my kids not squeamish about eating brains and tails, they also didn’t like the food just for some gross-out novelty factor. They really liked the veal brains because they were freaking delicious! That is awesomeness in a teen!

Our Family’s Five Food Rules for Traveling

We always travel with eating in mind. And in pursuit of gastronomic nirvana, here are five food rules we live by in our family:

1. What One Eats, All Eat

We always share food rather than having everyone order individual meals. Even at restaurants where sharing is not the norm, we share. We cut, slice, and pass plates around so everyone gets to try some of everything. But we go even further. No one is allowed to refuse to eat anything that any member of the family is willing to eat. If one of us eats boiled dog, all of us have to eat boiled dog. If one of us eats grasshopper, all of us eat grasshopper. If one of us eats tarantula, then each and every one of us better get ready for some spidery goodness!

When one eats dog, we all have to eat dog (in Vietnam)

2. Get in Line

Normally, I hate lines. But when it comes to food, I seek them out. I once stood in a line for 40 minutes in a Chicago snowstorm (and I live in Hawaii and don't do real well in the cold) to get a hot dog (actually it was a duck sausage with foie gras, and truffle mayo—totally worth it). Another time, I just hopped in a line I saw coming out the door of a dingy shack in the middle of Shanghai to see what would happen. The line was entirely locals (another good sign), and I ended up with dumplings that I still dream about.

Don’t know what to eat at the hawker center in Singapore? Just find a line, see what everyone else is ordering, and get the same. It will almost always be good.

And here is a corollary: places with weird and inconvenient opening hours are generally great. No one puts up with a noodle shop closed from 9 a.m. to 12:37 p.m. unless those are some fantastic noodles.

3. Authentic Is Great, but Non-Authentic Can Be Great Too

If you go to Bangkok, it is easy to find loads of fantastic authentic dishes that locals love and eat every day. You should certainly indulge in this local fare. You can also find lots of non-authentic food, especially catering to foreigners in many cases, and guess what . . . it is also often delicious! Don't be a snob. Eat what tastes good! The best pizza I have ever had was in Lukla, Nepal.

4. Eat the Street

Street food is great almost anywhere it is found. The US is experiencing a food truck craze. Europe has amazing sandwiches being sold on the street. Southeast Asia is a street food paradise. Street food is almost always cheap and delicious, and you can see the hygiene conditions since the "kitchen" is right in front of you. Combine a mass of street food vendors with rules 4 (eat the street), 2 (get in line), and 1 (what one eats, all eat) and you are ready for an extraordinarily good culinary time.

5. Get Away from the Famous Stuff

It doesn’t matter if it is the Louvre, Central Park, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Palace (any country’s “Grand Palace”), or whatever. The food is almost always better and cheaper a few blocks from the famous sites. The restaurants and street vendors right next to the heavily visited tourist sites rely on convenience of location to keep up business. That means the food doesn’t need to be good.

Instead, walk a bit. Find a place that will only stay in business if they get some local, repeat customers. Find a place that you need to look for and it will almost certainly be better.

Make Your Own Rules and Have Fun

Eating can be an adventure. Because travel is delicious.

My wife and I enjoy our first ceviche in Peru