Tuscaloosa
Stella
She plans around markets and long meals rather than checklists, and spent a year living in France — where lunch is a two-hour proposition and she thinks it should be.
Anyone can find the famous restaurant. The trip is better when someone knows what to book six months out and what to leave open.
Culinary travel has quietly become one of the harder things to plan well. The tables people actually want release months ahead and fill in minutes. The best cooking classes cap at eight. And the meal you’ll still be describing next year is usually not the expensive one — it’s the family kitchen in a village nobody put on a list.
We book both kinds. The reservation you can’t get, and the afternoon you’d never have found.
Three ways to do it
How much of the trip is about eating?
All of it, some of it, or just the good bits. Each shapes the itinerary differently.
Eat where the locals eat
Markets, home kitchens, small tables
A meal cooked in someone’s home, a market walk with a chef, generational recipes explained by the person who inherited them. The version of culinary travel that doesn’t show up in guidebooks, and the one people remember.
Learn to cook it
Classes, farms, and vineyards
Pasta in a Tuscan kitchen, paella where it was invented, a day at an olive press or a working farm. You come home able to make it again, which extends the trip considerably.
Sail for the food
Ships that take dining seriously
Several lines are genuinely food-first — cooking schools on board, complimentary specialty restaurants, and shore excursions built around markets and producers. Wine cruises through the regions that make it.
Where to eat well
Destinations worth the appetite
Spain
Iberian ham, olive oil country, and San Sebastián’s pintxos bars — which regularly outrank the restaurants around them.
Italy
Twenty regions, twenty cuisines. The trick is picking two and going deep rather than eating your way past all of them.
Japan
A UNESCO-recognized food culture, and the only country where a street cart and a multi-course kaiseki feel equally considered.
France
Lyon for the bouchons, Bordeaux and Burgundy for the wine, and a river cruise that connects them without a car.
Croatia & the Adriatic
Istrian truffles, Ston oysters, and 130 indigenous grape varieties, including the one that became Zinfandel.
Closer to home
Vancouver’s seafood, Québec City’s terroir, Las Vegas for celebrity kitchens in one walkable stretch. Long weekends, not long flights.
Who you’ll work with
Pick the office nearest you.
All four of our advisors plan culinary travel. Which one you work with is usually just a question of which office you’d rather walk into.
Dunwoody
Leslie
Deepest in Italy, Greece, France, and Ireland — four countries where the food is most of the reason to go. Planning trips since 1990.
Athens
Madeleine
Strong on Lake Como, Spain, and Portugal — and the one to call if the food trip is for a group, which is often the best way to do one.
Dunwoody
Steve
Left a career as a chiropractor to travel the world, and knows river cruising through France — which is largely a food trip with a boat attached.
Go deeper
More on culinary travel
Food-first cruise lines, cooking tours, and destinations worth planning a trip around — kept up to date through our relationships with colleagues around the world.
What do you want to eat?
Tell us that, and roughly when. It’s a better starting point than a destination, and we’ll work backwards from it.
