The gap between how well you can eat while travelling and how well most travellers actually eat is enormous, and it is almost entirely a matter of method. People end up in the restaurant with the laminated photograph menu on the main square not because they want to, but because they have no system for finding anything else.
Here is the system.
Walk away from the sight
The single most reliable rule. Food quality rises and price falls with distance from whatever people came to see. Two streets from the cathedral, the temple, the beach or the station is usually enough to change both by half.
The mechanism is simple: a restaurant beside a monument has an infinite supply of customers who will never return. A restaurant three streets away survives on people who come back.
Read the room before you sit down
Is anyone local eating there? The most useful single signal.
Is it busy at the local mealtime? Not at your mealtime — at theirs. Spain eats at 10pm, much of Asia at 6, and a restaurant that is empty at 7.30 in Madrid is not failing.
How short is the menu? A kitchen doing eight things does them well. A menu with 140 items and four cuisines has a freezer.
Is there turnover? Especially for street food, where the safety and the quality question have the same answer: high turnover means fresh.
Is someone’s mother visible? Only partly a joke.
Street food, and the safety question
Street food is generally safer than a hotel buffet, which is the opposite of most people’s assumption. The reasoning: it is cooked in front of you, at high heat, to order, and sold fast. Buffet food has been sitting under a lamp.
What to look for: a queue, high heat, the food cooked after you order, and the person handling money not also handling food — or if they are, that they are the only person doing both, which is common and manageable.
What to avoid: things that have been sitting out, raw garnishes and salads if you are somewhere the water is not safe, ice in drinks in the same places, and fruit you have not peeled yourself.
The health guide has the detail.
Markets are the shortcut
Almost every city’s food market has a section of stalls with stools. That is where the workers eat, it is the cheapest good food in the city, and the produce section next to it tells you what is actually in season.
Go in the morning. Ask what is good today. Eat what they point at.
Singapore’s hawker centres are the most organised version of this and the easiest place to start.
Ordering without the language
Point at what the next table has. Universally understood, universally well received, and it produces the dish the place is actually good at.
Learn six words: hello, please, thank you, delicious, the bill, and the name of the thing you cannot eat. That is thirty minutes of preparation and it changes the entire tenor of every interaction.
Photograph dishes you liked and show the photograph next time.
Translation apps with camera OCR read a menu instantly and are transformative in China, Japan, Korea, Thailand and anywhere else with a script you cannot sound out.
Say yes when someone recommends something. The answer will be better than what you were going to order.
Set-price lunch is the great arbitrage
Across most of Europe, Latin America and parts of Asia, restaurants run a fixed-price lunch menu — menú del día, prato feito, plat du jour, teishoku — at a fraction of dinner prices, in the same kitchen with the same chef.
Eating your main meal at lunch is the single biggest lever on a food budget and it costs you nothing in quality.
Eat the thing the place is for
Every region has two or three dishes it does better than anywhere on earth, and a long list of things it makes because tourists ask. Order the former.
You do not need to eat local food every meal for a month — nobody does, and the search for a bowl of pasta in week three is entirely legitimate. But the default should be what the place is good at.
What to be sceptical about
Anywhere with a person outside inviting you in. Restaurants with good food do not need to.
Menus in six languages with photographs.
“Authentic” as a marketing word, which is applied almost exclusively by places aimed at foreigners.
Review-site rankings in small towns, where the top three are frequently the three that speak the best English rather than the three that cook best. Reviews are much more useful in large cities.
The thing worth doing once per country
Take a cooking class, ideally one that starts at the market. It teaches you what the ingredients are, what the dishes are called, and what you are looking at for the rest of the trip. It is the highest-value half-day of any food-focused trip, and it is usually cheap.