Our Expert Guide to Seven of the World's Most Delicious Dining Destinations
Look, does it surprise you to learn that here at Serious Eats, we travel to eat? When we plan our dream itineraries, they usually include multiple days of second (and sometimes even third) dinners to fit it all in. Sure, we all have a lot of different hobbies—playing guitar, knitting, going to concerts, biking, watching sports, ultramarathoning, ultranapping, embroidery, boxing, pottery, horseback riding, swimming, hiking, capoeira, reading, taking in independent cinema, training cats (yes, really), bird watching, watercoloring, and more—but two loves we all share are food and travel. And when we can combine those two passions, that’s our favorite scenario. That’s why we’re so excited to share this brand-new culinary travel series, Global Eats, with you.
In this collection of seven culinary travel guides, Serious Eats’ food experts and recipe creators take you on highly personal tours of gastronomic destinations around the world. Whether it’s Kevin Vaughn bringing us behind a butcher shop counter in Buenos Aires or Clarissa Wei guiding you to the best traditional gongfu-style tea houses in Taipei, our recipe developers are letting you in on the restaurants, markets, shops, and street food spots that inspire their own recipes and cooking. There are a lot of travel guides out there, but what sets ours apart is the deep knowledge our experts bring to the table (pun intended) about the food scenes in each city.
No immediate travel plans on the horizon or still unsure where your next adventure should be? This guide is still for you! You can cook your way through selected recipes from each of these experts to recreate the flavors and specialities of each city at home—it might just help you decide where to go next. Be sure to click through to each city guide to find all of our recommendations—we have more than 50 recipes and 50 dining destinations across the seven guides. Now, grab your passport (or your pots and pans, for armchair travelers) and let’s go to Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Cairo, London, Mumbai, Taipei, and Paris!
Thailand is known as the Land of Smiles for its noteworthy hospitality, but even without the warm welcome extended to visitors, the country’s rich and varied cuisine would be reason enough for its long-held status as a top destination for food lovers. In this guide, we’re exploring the food scene in the capital city of Bangkok, which is renowned for its noodles bathed in rich broths, complex curries, punchy salads, sizzling satays, fiery dips, bone-warming soups, and so much more—all typically available for just a few dollars.
Your guides to Bangkok are chef, cookbook author, YouTuber, and Serious Eats contributor Pailin Chongchitnant, a native of southern Thailand who lived in Bangkok from age 13 until adulthood, along with our contributor Derek Lucci, a Brooklyn-based chef and food writer who has dedicated himself to perfecting Thai cuisine and bringing lesser-known Thai dishes to the US through online classes, supper clubs, and his recipes for Serious Eats.
Tag along as Chongchitnant visits her favorite restaurant for her absolute must-try noodle soup: boat noodles. “If you have one soup in Thailand, you should have boat soup,” she says. But definitely leave room for more than one soup because Lucci’s hot tip for a visit to Bangkok is to “try as many noodle shops as you can,” and he’s sharing his go-tos for the headiest broths and bounciest noodles. Inside this guide, you’ll also find plenty of recipes for creating the best of Bangkok at home, including bright-green gaeng khiao waan gai (green chicken curry), punchy gai pad king (chicken and ginger stir-fry), moo palo (pork-belly stew with eggs), sour and spicy tom yam pla (fish soup), yam khai dao (fried egg salad), crabmeat fried rice, and (yes!) boat noodles—just to name a few dishes to whet your appetite.
Want to know where to find the very best costillas a la riojana (pork chops with fried eggs and vegetables), buttery, savory empanadas, or sweet alfajores in Buenos Aires—and how to make those dishes at home? Then you’ve come to the right place. Your guide to the capital of Argentina is longtime Serious Eats contributor Kevin Vaughn, a writer, cook, and tour operator who’s been living in Buenos Aires for more than a decade.
Vaughn knows the food scene in Buenos Aires inside and out, from casual cafes and empanada spots to must-visit bakeries, butchers, and markets. The culinary tour he’s taking you on delves much deeper than the common but vastly oversimplified narrative of Buenos Aires “as a city whose cultural identity is often whittled down to tales of Italian immigrants arriving to the New World and constructing a city in Paris’ likeness.” Yes, the influence of Italian immigrants can be seen on the city’s cuisine, but so too can that of immigrants from across Europe, the Levant, the Caucasus, East Asia, and Latin America, Vaughn explains. And it’s not just historical influences at play—Buenos Aires is also a city with a cuisine that’s very much alive, full of chefs and vendors who are constantly innovating, rather than a place that’s “preserved in amber,” as Vaughn puts it.
So put on your walking shoes and come along as Vaughn takes you on a tour of this stunning, simmering melting pot. And rest assured, if you’re not quite ready to book tickets to Argentina today, this guide will help you bring Buenos Aires home with plenty of recipes that’ll pique your curiosity until the day you’re ready to visit in person.
With its ancient monuments and millennia of history, Cairo would be a top travel destination even if its cuisine was mediocre. But luckily for culinary travelers, the food in Cairo is as stunning and compelling as the sights. This sprawling metropolis is chock-a-block with gems for food-loving visitors, including steaming food carts, bazaars, buzzing souks vending a rainbow of spices, and family-run regional restaurants with patio seating along the Nile. Your expert guide for our culinary tour of Egypt’s bustling capital is Egyptian food writer and recipe developer Nermine Mansour, who was born and raised in and around Cairo, and is a frequent visitor to the city, although she now resides in the US.
Click through for Mansour’s full insider’s tour of her beloved city, which has gone through a metamorphosis since the Arab Spring 13 years ago. Mansour says that after the overthrow of strongman Hosni Mubarak, the Cairo food scene changed noticeably, first with a surge of street stall vendors in downtown Cairo selling classic Egyptian fare, followed by street carts run by new immigrants from around the Middle East—including those from Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria—as well as a blossoming of fine-dining restaurants.
“Egypt is a food paradise for Americans and Europeans,” says Mansour. “You can get the best food in the country for almost nothing, and Egypt can cater to any dietary restriction, including vegan, gluten free, meat, seafood, and even keto.” This complexity is layered on top of a cuisine that already displays thousands of centuries of Mediterranean, North African, Ottoman, Indian, French, and other influences. Tag along with Mansour as she goes spice shopping and visits restaurants and food stalls for her favorite koshari (a fragrant dish of lentils, rice, and pasta), bissara (fava bean dip), fatta (slow-cooked beef in a garlic-vinegar sauce over toasted pita and toasted basmati rice), ful medames (stewed fava beans), and more—then learn to make these dishes at home with her very own recipes.
If you have an interest in culinary travel—which we assume you do if you are reading this guide!—you no doubt know that that dusty old notion of London as a, well, dusty old dining destination is solidly a thing of the past. These days, you’ll find yourself with the challenge of narrowing down your list of places to visit in a single trip. And we have just the duo to guide you on your grand tour of this world capital’s food scene: British pastry chef, recipe developer, and cookbook author Nicola Lamb and recipe developer Rebecca Frey, an American who was so mesmerized with London’s culture, entertainment, and food that she now lives there.
Whether you are hanking for classic pub fare, dim sum, Turkish skewered meats grilled over live coals, high tea, or the intriguingly named knickerbocker glory ice cream sundae—or all of the above—Lamb and Frey have the inside scoop on where to get them in London, and they’re sharing it all here. “It’s a place where you have this free movement between these amazing food cultures that come to London. You can go for a classic British food experience like cream tea or Sunday roast, but…you also have excellent places that have fried chicken bao and things designed for a Londoner’s palate, and at the same time, these crowd-pleasing dishes live on the menu alongside delicious pork bone noodles—you can get soup dumplings and a Sichuan tripe dish on the same menu, and it makes perfect sense because it’s London,” says Lamb. Inside this guide, you’ll also find recipes for recreating some classic London fare at home, including a Bake Off–worthy genoise sponge and that aforementioned knickerbocker glory, a tower of ice cream, syrup, fresh fruit, whipped cream, and a fan wafer. London calling, indeed.
Want to tour Mumbai with somebody who’s equally adept at pointing out which street stalls to go to and which to avoid for the best bread pakora as she is at recommending which of the city’s poshest and trendiest eateries are worth a visit to sample cocktails, chaat, and a thali boasted a dozen dishes on one tray? Meet your guide to this installment of our culinary travel series: cookbook author and recipe developer Chetna Makan, who was born and raised in the city of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh before moving to Mumbai to study fashion. Makan now lives in England, but she returns to Mumbai every year to see family and friends and to make sure she’s up to date on the latest in Mumbai food culture—and now she’s sharing those insights with you.
In addition to revealing her favorite places to eat and shop in Mumbai, Makan is sharing her tips for navigating the city’s twisty and bustling streets, as well as how to eat incredibly well without risking food poisoning—which unfortunately is a valid concern in the city. But with Makan at your (virtual) side, you’ll dine on “carb on carb” delights at the food stalls crowded into the alleys off of Mumbai’s grand Victorian Gothic rail station, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, without concern. If you’re not quite ready to hop on a flight to Mumbai, this guide is still for you—it’s full of Makan’s recipes for some of the many delights that await when you do plan that trip to India’s most influential food city, and arguably one of the most influential food cities in the world.
Paris sits at the tippity top of many food lovers’ culinary travel wish lists for good reasons—the unparalleled cheese, bread, pastries, charcuterie, and wines, just to name a handful. But that very abundance of great food can make a trip to Paris—whether it’s your first or 50th—overwhelming. Where to start? Well, we suggest starting here, with our guide to the City of Light that includes recommendations from two certified food nerds on the Serious Eats staff, Editorial Director Daniel Gritzer and Culinary Editor Genevieve Yam. Daniel worked for years at New York City’s famed Chanterelle, studied charcuterie in the South of France, and was mentored in modern French cooking fundamentals under Didier Virot, a Michel Bras–trained chef. Genevieve is a veteran of Per Se and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, as well as an accomplished baker and pastry chef—when she’s whipping up pastry in our test kitchen, you’re sure to find the rest of our staff sniffing around for a taste. Both have come off their most recent trips to Paris with a host of dining recommendations they’re sharing here, including their favorite brasseries, boulangeries, patisseries, and bistros.
Dig into buckwheat crêpes with ham, egg, and cheese; pan-roasted game partridges; beef confit; grilled scallops; steak au poivre or steak frites; asparagus or poached chicken with sauce gribiche; silky chocolate mousse; and pastries galore. And if you can’t get to Paris as quickly as you’d like, we have your back with plenty of recipes to make in the meantime, including Daniel’s coquilles Saint-Jacques (luscious scallops sauced in veloute and topped with browned breadcrumbs) and Genevieve’s île flottante (baked meringue suspended in a pool of crème anglaise), just to name two highlights. Click through for our full guide—we promise, it’s magnifique!
There are many travel guides to Taipei, but we only know of one written by an award-winning cookbook author who lives in the city—and that’s the guide we’re sharing right here. For this culinary tour of the capital of Taiwan, we tapped Serious Eats contributor Clarissa Wei, a food writer and recipe developer who recently won the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Julia Child First Book Award for her cookbook, Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation. And now Wei is sharing a handful of her favorite markets, restaurants, and tea houses—some of the very places that inspired the recipes in her cookbook and right here on Serious Eats.
“In Taipei, food isn’t confined to brick-and-mortars; insead, it spills out into the streets,” Wei says. “Night markets take up entire neighborhoods, where pedestrians graze from stall to stall holding fistfuls of skewers. There are breakfast shops open 24/7, where the smell of freshly brewed hot soymilk and deep-fried dough wafts onto busy streets. And lots of restaurants have outdoor seating, with tables sprawled out on the sidewalks on a busy Friday night.” Join Wei as she visits Ningxia market to dig into deep-fried chewy squid balls and five-spice scented popcorn chicken, then head off with her to gaze at the tidy pyramids of fruit and vegetables at Shi-Dong market. After you’ve strolled around enough to build your appetite back up, head with her to Baxian, “a perfect spot for visitors to dive into Taiwan’s late-night dining scene” with Taiwanese classics like fried rice, spicy braised stinky tofu, and stir-fried clams with garlic and fresh basil. With Wei’s recipes included in this culinary travel guide extraordinaire, you can also get excited for your trip or relive memories of your visit to Taipei by cooking up some of those Taiwanese classics at home.
Credits
Bangkok photography by Graeme Kennedy
Buenos Aires photography by Kevin Vaughn
Cairo photography by Hana Gamal
London photography by Callum Heinrich
Paris Photography by Adriana Parrilla
Mumbai photography by Jatin Sharma
Taipei photography by An Rong Xu
Creative Direction: Amanda Suarez, Sabrina Tan, Janet Maples
