on culinary travel ❖
holly hughes
Catching the Wave of Culinary Tourism TWENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN I was editing travel guides from a desk in New York, it was a radical move to hire local food writers to provide restaurant reviews. Publishing wisdom decreed that the same writer who tramped through museums and thumped motel mattresses could also throw together a list of eateries, mixing tried-and-true white-tablecloth standards with an upscale diner or two for budget travelers. Zagat only published one slim guide, to Manhattan; Michelin’s red guides only covered Europe. I never imagined that someday there’d be a market for my international travel guide, 500 Places for Food & Wine Lovers. Oh, how things have changed. I blame Peter Mayle’s 1991 bestseller A Year In Provence. Once it was enough simply to drive through the South of France, admiring its scenery and sampling local cafes. Now, every visitor to Provence or Tuscany has to lug home a suitcase weighed down with bottles of olive oil, jars of preserves and obscure items of cookware. The change took us all by surprise. By 1998, when the term “culinary tourism” was first coined, it labeled a trend that was already in full swing. Now there’s even an International Culinary Tourism Association (www.culinarytourism.org), founded in 2003 as a clearinghouse for travel professionals interested in booking the best dine-arounds, winery tours, farm visits and spa dining. There was a time when cooking classes and chef demos were only for spouse programs – nowadays, both halves of the couple show up, spatulas 8 October 2009
in hand (all those aspiring Rachael Rays and Anthony Bourdains!). And it’s not enough just to labor over a hot stove — most cooking schools also usher their students into local markets, onto the fishing docks to see (and smell!) the day’s catch hauled off the boats, or into the very fields, orchards and gardens where their ingredients grow. Even Anthony Bourdain nowadays appears more often on the Travel Chan-
Word of the Year – a sure sign that food and place are ever more inextricably linked in people’s minds. At first, being a locavore referred to how daily eating habits relate to one’s home community, supporting sustainable agriculture and local farmers. But it didn’t take long for travelers to jump on the locavore bandwagon too. Learning about local foods has become an essential part of pre-trip research, from identifying native crops
Learning about local foods has become an essential part of pre-trip research nel than the Food Network. As Michael Pollan (author of the bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma) noted recently in the New York Times Magazine, while the Travel Channel offers more culinary travel shows, the Food Network itself features fewer how-to cooking shows and more eating travelogues. The new culinary tourism is distinct from gourmet tourism. It used to be that travelers bragged about scoring a hard-to-get reservation at a five-star restaurant when they came home from vacation. The new trophy restaurants? No-name backstreet “finds” that aren’t listed in any standard travel guide — mom-and-pop diners, seafood shacks, ethnic storefronts, the dives only locals know. Authenticity is the name of the game. A NEW WORD In 2008, the New Oxford American Dictionary declared “locavore” the New
(blueberries and lobster in Maine, oysters and okra in Louisiana) to making a checklist of regional dishes to sample. Whetting your appetite before a trip is half the fun. Bird-watchers keep their own life lists – why shouldn’t a barbecuelover work on a life list of famous shacks, from North Carolina to Texas? It’s a moving target, though. Restaurants close, chefs move, menus change. The same goes for wineries, microbreweries and farm tours – new stars rise every season. I expect that my next edition of 500 Places For Food & Wine Lovers will feature a raft of must-see culinary destinations that don’t even exist today. Staying ahead of the curve is a challenge – but the research sure is fun. Holly Hughes is the author of Frommer’s 500 Places for Food & Wine Lovers (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 471 pages, $19.99).
LeisureGroupTravel.com