Travelling is about experiencing local cultures and food is an essential part of every culture. That’s why I travel - to eat.
Famous words by a good friend of ours, Nikola. Spoken on top of Ponte Veccio while debating whether trying the famous Florentine Steak was a crucial part of our exploration of The City of Lillies. After all €50 meals are something you consider very carefully when travelling on a student budget. Plus it’s really hard to get food wrong in Italy, so we weren’t choosing between a fancy meal and a shitty quick bite.
We ended up trying the steak (we weren’t particularly impressed by it) and at the time we brushed off that statement attributing it to Nikola’s seemingly insatiable appetite. It wasn’t until much later that we started finding ourselves in various countries around the world seeking exciting foods as one of our main activities. We realized we had been converted to food tourism without knowing it!
Nowadays food has a central role in our travels and we make an effort to find out where the locals eat and go there, regardless of how many reviews there are online for a particular place. One of our favourite ways to experience different cuisines was exploring the food markets while we were living in London. The variety of foods is unrivalled, the ingredients are often higher quality and it’s an experience in and of itself. We highly recommend you to visit local food markets wherever you go and if you’re ever in London, here’s a long list* of everything we visited, ranked from our least to most favourite.
* It got too long so we had to split it in several parts.