Our Philosophy on Eating Out
It’s no secret that we eat out a lot on our travels. In fact, food is one of the main reasons that we choose each country we visit, so cooking at home would be a waste for us. With that said, we’re also budget-conscious and definitely can’t afford to eat at Michelin-starred restaurants all the time. I want to take a moment to share our philosophy on dining out with you, because maybe it will help you as you plan how to eat on your next adventure!
1. We Avoid the “Mediocre Middle”
A year or two ago, I read an article that I tragically can’t find again that did a fantastic job of summing up our perspective on this. (Maybe it was in the New York Times? Do you know the article I mean? Please send me the link if so, and I’ll add it!)
In short, eating at the extremes of cost is where we’ve found the most value. We’re in Bangkok as I write this, so I’ll use this as my example.
The low end:
Street food or casual cafeterias or dining halls full of locals tend to cost anywhere from $1 to $1.50 USD for a plate of incredibly delicious food. This is where we eat most of our meals, and how we get a broad taste of what the local cuisine is actually like.
The high end:
You can get a truly amazing meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant here for about $100 USD per person. The restaurant I have in mind offers an incredible 9-course tasting menu full of innovative dishes that still clearly show their Thai roots.
The mediocre middle:
Restaurants between these two extremes, costing maybe $15 to $30 USD per person for a meal, are in general not worth it for us. (There are a few exceptions, of course.) The food tends to be decent, but not mind-blowing. It’s definitely not worth 5 to 10 times the price of the amazing meals we could eat on the street, and the amount of variety we could experience for the same price. Neither is it so incredible and innovative that we’re happy to splurge on it. We also find that these restaurants tend to be geared toward tourists, so they’re often a watered-down version of what you might find elsewhere.
Almost all the time, we go for either the low end or the high end. Saving money by eating at affordable local places most of the time allows us to occasionally splurge on high-end meals. And we get the best of both worlds: the amazing flavors and variety of street food, and the incredible innovation and creativity of fine dining.
Why would we pay the same total amount, or more, to eat in the mediocre middle all the time?
2. We Eat Just About Anything…
We’re dedicated to trying local foods from everywhere we go, and not being those tourists who get whiny and overreact to anything being different or “weird.” (Case in point: once, in Paris, I found myself dragged by circumstantial travel companions to McDonald’s because the other restaurants had “weird” burgers. Once there, these travel companions disappointedly informed me that the McDonald’s burgers were “weird” too because the sauce was “wrong.”)
This is how we’ve found ourselves trying everything from snails and crickets to lamb’s head and guinea pig.
As someone who goes through phases of veganism and vegetarianism, I still eat plant-based foods most of the time. I’ll try at least a few bites of almost anything, though (octopus is still off the table).
Boiled snails from a street vendor in Marrakech.
3. ...With Reasonable Caution
While we’ll eat almost anything in theory, we still exercise reasonable precautions. If we walk up to a street food stall and see raw chicken meat with flies on it that’s obviously been sitting in the sun for hours, we don’t eat there.
4. We Never Express Distaste
There have been a lot of things that we’ve eaten around the world that we didn’t enjoy. A tepid sun-warmed clam salad that had been sitting out in the open air for hours, for example. (We ordered that by mistake.) But I strongly believe that one of the rudest things you can do as a first-world traveler is to suggest that another culture’s food isn’t “good enough.”
On the rare occasion that we genuinely cannot bring ourselves to eat most of something, we’ll plead fullness and take the rest to go “to eat later.”
What are your rules for eating out as you travel? What do you think of ours? Let us know in the comments!