As Anthony Bourdain demonstrated, dining may be the best reason to travel. Bourdain created a movement that has reached a mass that the go local, eat local, act like a local theme has swung the travel pendulum in a different but equally extreme direction—local is the new major chain brand. There are travel websites dedicated to food. Instagram accounts are filled with photos of plates. It’s resulted in everyone tries to be different and in doing so everyone winds up being the same. Travel is nothing more than a vacation and food is…well…it’s just food. When you are traveling on the road for 365 days you realize there’s only a few photo worthy meals, like chili crab in Singapore or fugu in Japan. And those photos? It’s still obnoxious taking photos of meals that many locals can’t afford to eat. Many locals are heading to markets, cooking dinner, then repurposing those ingredients for breakfast and lunch the next day. They are supplementing their meals with rice to fill their stomachs. When you are dining out, you are dining like the upper 5% of society, making the whole going local theme a tad ironic. Enough ranting.
When you are paying $15-$20 a night for a hostel, food may be your highest daily transaction expense. If you are trying to maximize your budget, it’s important to give thought to where you eat and how much you spend per meal.
BREAKFAST
As an American, I feel confident stating that no other country does breakfast as well as the U.S. Living in America, you don’t realize the dominance of America’s breakfast game. It’s so dominant we had to create a fourth meal, brunch, to fit the dominance overflow. Internationally there’s congee in China. Omurice in Japan. Thailand has a strong pancake game. It’s tough to beat a pain au chocolat in Paris. These are one-offs, exceptions to the rule that international breakfast is a food wasteland.
I view breakfast as a good time for cheat meal—a way to satisfy a western craving, like fried chicken. There were times when I was craving fried chicken and it was KFC to the rescue. I never wanted to burn a lunch or dinner at a KFC but to satisfy a craving, I gladly ate a fried chicken sandwich for breakfast.
Breakfast is a good meal to visit a country’s national chains. Hong Kong has a chain called Tsiu Wah, which is their version of a Denny’s. Tsui Wah falls into the category of must try Hong Kong dining experiences but it’s a bit crazy to recommend going there for dinner to try their baked lasagna with all of Hong Kong’s other dining options. However, Tsui Wah’s breakfast value combos, like satay beef with instant noodles, are cheap and as local experience as any meal posted on Instagram.
When booking hostels check if breakfast is included. I believe that fewer hostels include breakfast than in the past so unless the hostel states otherwise, a free breakfast is unlikely to be included in the nightly rate. When breakfast is included, it’s not much more than toast and butter. I packed a bowl and a set of utensils so I could eat Cheerios for breakfast (and sometimes dinner—another quick way to save money).
LUNCH
Don’t overlook lunch for a big dinner later in the day. The best dining money-saving trick is to swap lunch for dinner—that is, go fancy, with a big meal for lunch and eat a lighter dinner. Many restaurants, particularly those in super-cosmopolitan cities, the Parises and Tokyos, have two menus, lunch and dinner, with the same items—the lunch menu offers 20% discounts because it’s a slightly smaller portion and the restaurant needs to attract the mid-week work crowd. In practice this means having the steak frites for lunch, then eat a baguette for dinner. The switch will work out well for your waistline too. This budget saving trick works so well I continued with the technique since returning home. I take day trips around the Philadelphia area, each lunch at a local restaurant, then each a light dinner at home.
DINNER
If I ate a heavy meal at a fine restaurant for lunch, then I often turned to the local chains for dinner. You can’t visit the Philippines without stopping in Jollibee a couple of times. Phnom Penh has a place called Lucky Burger. In Europe there’s a kebab stand on every corner. There’s hawker centers and food courts. There’s street stalls and night markets. The few times I made a coordinated effort to eat specific dinner meals were for instances like chili crab in Singapore and for fugu and Kobe steak in Japan.
Everyone flocks to the street stalls and the night markets for a local dinner experience but locals also shop at supermarkets. I love walking the aisles at supermarkets in major cities searching for unique local food. You want a slice of the real Philadelphia? Head to the ShopRite on Ridge Avenue in the Roxborough neighborhood. The same theory holds true in Tokyo, Sydney, and Paris. If you are spending weeks in a country, invariably you’ll turn to meals at a supermarket. After 8pm, many Japanese supermarkets offer a 25% discount on sushi. Be careful that you aren’t pinching pennies too much with supermarket meals. Supermarket sushi in Japan…is…well…supermarket sushi. And I like supermarket sushi. Out of 60 lunches and dinners in Japan, I ate at least 10 supermarket sushi meals. That’s fine but if you don’t pay up a couple of times for the good stuff then you are missing out on life altering sushi.
GOING LOCAL AND OTHER DINING THOUGHTS
To find local restaurants experiment with searches for coffeeshops or breakfasts as opposed to dinner. I always tried to obtain results from local blogs or the major local newspapers rather than TripAdvisor or around the world travel blogs. Altering search terms helped to turn up local bloggers and media in the search results. Nobody who visits a city for three days is an expert on that city’s cuisine. When I traveled around Hong Kong in search of the best coffee shops, I read numerous articles about the “Three Best Coffee Shops in Hong Kong.” Each of these articles started with “I spent three days in Hong Kong…” The articles should have been titled “I Spent Three Days in Hong Kong and Drank Three Cups of Coffee.”
Every city will have its local blogger, its local “best of” lists and rankings which will be better and fresher than a TripAdvisor listing. Google makes finding these local bloggers more difficult than it should be because they push the large, established sources to the top of searches. To help find these local bloggers, search for the top new restaurants, the recently opened restaurants, and you will stumble upon better rankings from more authoritative sources than travel bloggers. For Philadelphia Google “Philadelphia Magazines Top Restaurants” or check out the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Craig Laban for reviews of what’s hot. There are equivalents of these sources in nearly every major city in the world. The magazines and newspapers do a better job of highlighting seasonal cuisines. Clay Pot Rice is an essential winter dish in Hong Kong that a travel blogger who visited in June won’t know about. But you will find a listing of the best Clay Pot Rice restaurants in a South China Morning Post article.
Middle-class dining is the restaurant sweet spot. Don’t go cheap and eat street food for an entire year. Middle-class dining outside of America and Europe is cheap and typically worth the slightly higher cost than street food. There’s tremendous cost / benefit value in paying an extra few bucks for a good meal at least once a day. You can eat a good meal in Laos for $4. You can eat one of the best meals ever for $6. Consider this when you are planning your initial budget. It’s worth working an additional month to boost your savings for the dining upgrade.
Pick your Western cravings wisely so that you don’t fall victim to skipping local meals. I ate lunch at one McDonald’s during my travels—a ridiculously fancy franchise in Guangzhou. The Ikea in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay neighborhood is a true, only in Hong Kong dining experience. The line to enter the cafeteria is so long you’d think a 3-Star Michelin restaurant is inside. Western brands also appear in supermarkets. There a handful of multi-national food companies in the world but at least Frito-Lay and Nestle keep the local products on the shelves after they acquire their in-country competition. Each country has a different take on potato chips and unique snack food flavors. In India, I stocked up on Kurkure’s Masala Munch before every train ride. I ate many Nova chip dinners while taking ferries in the Philippines.
Beyond the international chain brands, don’t be afraid to eat Italian or Chinese in India. Or Mexican in Japan. Or Mexican anywhere. An Indian take on Italian and a Japanese take on Mexican is as much of a cultural experience as eating the local cuisine. America has Americanized Chinese, Americanized Mexican. India has Indianized Chinese. All countries localize the cuisine of other countries with their own twist.
Dining extends beyond meals and dishes to include local sweets and snacks. For all of Anthony Bourdain’s travels, he rarely ate desserts. Over the course of multiple Hong Kong episodes, I never saw him eat an egg waffle in Hong Kong which is a major, major dining miss. I never saw him eat kaya toast or drink kopi in Singapore—that’s a huge miss if you spend more than three days in Singapore. Even ice cream and other snacks vary in the 7-11s on a country by country basis. There’s KitKat ice cream in Malaysia 7-11s—KitKat ice cream!!!
Local beers are easy to find and there’s never a reason to not drink a country’s national beer or a region’s local beer. I think there’s no such thing as a bad local beer because there’s an inherent local vibe about drinking a local beer that transcends taste. My favorite local beer is every local beer or a country’s national beer. There are few microbreweries outside of the U.S. I was in Russia in May 2018 and there were a handful of microbreweries that had opened since 2010. Japan has restrictive rules that limit the formation of new brewers. Singapore’s RedDot Brewery has an outpost on Boat Quay…it is the only establishment to patronize on Boat Quay.
Google whether tipping is appropriate and, if so, what is a reasonable tip. Don't feel guilty about not tipping. In the countries where you don't tip, the waitstaff receives a livable wage. These countries have figured something out that has eluded the U.S.
The travels have ended but the food cravings never stopped. I continue to use breakfast, coffee, and microbrewery search terms to explore previously uncharted neighborhoods and eat international cuisine without leaving Philadelphia.
BREAKFAST
As an American, I feel confident stating that no other country does breakfast as well as the U.S. Living in America, you don’t realize the dominance of America’s breakfast game. It’s so dominant we had to create a fourth meal, brunch, to fit the dominance overflow. Internationally there’s congee in China. Omurice in Japan. Thailand has a strong pancake game. It’s tough to beat a pain au chocolat in Paris. These are one-offs, exceptions to the rule that international breakfast is a food wasteland.
I view breakfast as a good time for cheat meal—a way to satisfy a western craving, like fried chicken. There were times when I was craving fried chicken and it was KFC to the rescue. I never wanted to burn a lunch or dinner at a KFC but to satisfy a craving, I gladly ate a fried chicken sandwich for breakfast.
Breakfast is a good meal to visit a country’s national chains. Hong Kong has a chain called Tsiu Wah, which is their version of a Denny’s. Tsui Wah falls into the category of must try Hong Kong dining experiences but it’s a bit crazy to recommend going there for dinner to try their baked lasagna with all of Hong Kong’s other dining options. However, Tsui Wah’s breakfast value combos, like satay beef with instant noodles, are cheap and as local experience as any meal posted on Instagram.
When booking hostels check if breakfast is included. I believe that fewer hostels include breakfast than in the past so unless the hostel states otherwise, a free breakfast is unlikely to be included in the nightly rate. When breakfast is included, it’s not much more than toast and butter. I packed a bowl and a set of utensils so I could eat Cheerios for breakfast (and sometimes dinner—another quick way to save money).
LUNCH
Don’t overlook lunch for a big dinner later in the day. The best dining money-saving trick is to swap lunch for dinner—that is, go fancy, with a big meal for lunch and eat a lighter dinner. Many restaurants, particularly those in super-cosmopolitan cities, the Parises and Tokyos, have two menus, lunch and dinner, with the same items—the lunch menu offers 20% discounts because it’s a slightly smaller portion and the restaurant needs to attract the mid-week work crowd. In practice this means having the steak frites for lunch, then eat a baguette for dinner. The switch will work out well for your waistline too. This budget saving trick works so well I continued with the technique since returning home. I take day trips around the Philadelphia area, each lunch at a local restaurant, then each a light dinner at home.
DINNER
If I ate a heavy meal at a fine restaurant for lunch, then I often turned to the local chains for dinner. You can’t visit the Philippines without stopping in Jollibee a couple of times. Phnom Penh has a place called Lucky Burger. In Europe there’s a kebab stand on every corner. There’s hawker centers and food courts. There’s street stalls and night markets. The few times I made a coordinated effort to eat specific dinner meals were for instances like chili crab in Singapore and for fugu and Kobe steak in Japan.
Everyone flocks to the street stalls and the night markets for a local dinner experience but locals also shop at supermarkets. I love walking the aisles at supermarkets in major cities searching for unique local food. You want a slice of the real Philadelphia? Head to the ShopRite on Ridge Avenue in the Roxborough neighborhood. The same theory holds true in Tokyo, Sydney, and Paris. If you are spending weeks in a country, invariably you’ll turn to meals at a supermarket. After 8pm, many Japanese supermarkets offer a 25% discount on sushi. Be careful that you aren’t pinching pennies too much with supermarket meals. Supermarket sushi in Japan…is…well…supermarket sushi. And I like supermarket sushi. Out of 60 lunches and dinners in Japan, I ate at least 10 supermarket sushi meals. That’s fine but if you don’t pay up a couple of times for the good stuff then you are missing out on life altering sushi.
GOING LOCAL AND OTHER DINING THOUGHTS
To find local restaurants experiment with searches for coffeeshops or breakfasts as opposed to dinner. I always tried to obtain results from local blogs or the major local newspapers rather than TripAdvisor or around the world travel blogs. Altering search terms helped to turn up local bloggers and media in the search results. Nobody who visits a city for three days is an expert on that city’s cuisine. When I traveled around Hong Kong in search of the best coffee shops, I read numerous articles about the “Three Best Coffee Shops in Hong Kong.” Each of these articles started with “I spent three days in Hong Kong…” The articles should have been titled “I Spent Three Days in Hong Kong and Drank Three Cups of Coffee.”
Every city will have its local blogger, its local “best of” lists and rankings which will be better and fresher than a TripAdvisor listing. Google makes finding these local bloggers more difficult than it should be because they push the large, established sources to the top of searches. To help find these local bloggers, search for the top new restaurants, the recently opened restaurants, and you will stumble upon better rankings from more authoritative sources than travel bloggers. For Philadelphia Google “Philadelphia Magazines Top Restaurants” or check out the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Craig Laban for reviews of what’s hot. There are equivalents of these sources in nearly every major city in the world. The magazines and newspapers do a better job of highlighting seasonal cuisines. Clay Pot Rice is an essential winter dish in Hong Kong that a travel blogger who visited in June won’t know about. But you will find a listing of the best Clay Pot Rice restaurants in a South China Morning Post article.
Middle-class dining is the restaurant sweet spot. Don’t go cheap and eat street food for an entire year. Middle-class dining outside of America and Europe is cheap and typically worth the slightly higher cost than street food. There’s tremendous cost / benefit value in paying an extra few bucks for a good meal at least once a day. You can eat a good meal in Laos for $4. You can eat one of the best meals ever for $6. Consider this when you are planning your initial budget. It’s worth working an additional month to boost your savings for the dining upgrade.
Pick your Western cravings wisely so that you don’t fall victim to skipping local meals. I ate lunch at one McDonald’s during my travels—a ridiculously fancy franchise in Guangzhou. The Ikea in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay neighborhood is a true, only in Hong Kong dining experience. The line to enter the cafeteria is so long you’d think a 3-Star Michelin restaurant is inside. Western brands also appear in supermarkets. There a handful of multi-national food companies in the world but at least Frito-Lay and Nestle keep the local products on the shelves after they acquire their in-country competition. Each country has a different take on potato chips and unique snack food flavors. In India, I stocked up on Kurkure’s Masala Munch before every train ride. I ate many Nova chip dinners while taking ferries in the Philippines.
Beyond the international chain brands, don’t be afraid to eat Italian or Chinese in India. Or Mexican in Japan. Or Mexican anywhere. An Indian take on Italian and a Japanese take on Mexican is as much of a cultural experience as eating the local cuisine. America has Americanized Chinese, Americanized Mexican. India has Indianized Chinese. All countries localize the cuisine of other countries with their own twist.
Dining extends beyond meals and dishes to include local sweets and snacks. For all of Anthony Bourdain’s travels, he rarely ate desserts. Over the course of multiple Hong Kong episodes, I never saw him eat an egg waffle in Hong Kong which is a major, major dining miss. I never saw him eat kaya toast or drink kopi in Singapore—that’s a huge miss if you spend more than three days in Singapore. Even ice cream and other snacks vary in the 7-11s on a country by country basis. There’s KitKat ice cream in Malaysia 7-11s—KitKat ice cream!!!
Local beers are easy to find and there’s never a reason to not drink a country’s national beer or a region’s local beer. I think there’s no such thing as a bad local beer because there’s an inherent local vibe about drinking a local beer that transcends taste. My favorite local beer is every local beer or a country’s national beer. There are few microbreweries outside of the U.S. I was in Russia in May 2018 and there were a handful of microbreweries that had opened since 2010. Japan has restrictive rules that limit the formation of new brewers. Singapore’s RedDot Brewery has an outpost on Boat Quay…it is the only establishment to patronize on Boat Quay.
Google whether tipping is appropriate and, if so, what is a reasonable tip. Don't feel guilty about not tipping. In the countries where you don't tip, the waitstaff receives a livable wage. These countries have figured something out that has eluded the U.S.
The travels have ended but the food cravings never stopped. I continue to use breakfast, coffee, and microbrewery search terms to explore previously uncharted neighborhoods and eat international cuisine without leaving Philadelphia.