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Best Travel Destinations for Foodies

By September 25, 2014December 12th, 2014Travel Blog

For foodies that follow their taste buds, travel is all about experiencing new tastes as well as the best of what a region has to offer. Although the list of best travel destinations for foodies could be almost endless, it seemed like a good idea to talk about just a couple of international destinations as well as domestic ones that are a mix of standard and surprising.

Tokyo

Everything from the amalgam of complex seafood and vegetable dishes to the sublime simplicity of infinite exploration of individual ingredients such as noodles or parts of various animals is what makes Japanese cuisine unrivalled in the world. From local food stands to fine dining establishments, Tokyo provides foodies with a travel experience that is exquisitely high quality at both the high and low end of the dining scale.

Paris

Paris keeps from becoming a cliché in terms of fine dining with its mix of the traditional as well as the experimental. If you’re a first-time traveler without access to experienced French diners, you can utilize tools like franceguide.com or be adventurous and ask noted Paris café owners where they eat for an authentic experience.

Istanbul

Exotic culinary adventure is the phrase shared by many foodies as well as hearty vacationers when it comes to travel, and Istanbul delivers on all counts. The market culture with piles and piles of spices as well as its restaurants, many of which are hundreds of years old, can provide much more than just the satisfaction of a tourist’s palette. This is a city that has long delighted foodies.

New Orleans

The Crescent City may be a no brainer when it comes to domestic travel destinations for foodies, but few places in the U.S. provide such a broad choice of cultural cuisines in their purist forms as well as hybrids that could only be concocted in New Orleans. As a food-obsessed city, New Orleans is constantly reinventing itself with everything from beignets and gumbo to comfort food and Cajun. French, Italian, Mediterranean and more are done here like nowhere else, which is the perfect travel invitation as far as foodies are concerned.

Las Vegas

Excess and artificial; glitz and glamour: these adjectives may describe the most obvious aspects of Vegas, but they don’t define it when it comes to food. You have to bring the world’s best foods and chefs to a place like Las Vegas to bring in the big money and the weekend traveler. From its panoply of celebrity chefs in residence providing French, Italian, Mexican, Mediterranean, Southern and sushi, you can literally go from one casino /hotel to the next and find some of the best foodie experiences at almost any price point you desire.

As we said, the list could go on forever. From the southwest fair of Santa Fe to the seafood and baked goods of San Francisco, there are dozens of locales that are a mecca for foodies. To broaden your horizons, this list from Livability.com ranked what it called the 10 best cities in the U.S. for “foodies,” which has some unexpected surprises on it that you should check out.

  1. New Haven, Connecticut
  2. Scottsdale, Arizona
  3. Boston, Massachusetts
  4. Asheville, North Carolina
  5. Traverse City, Michigan
  6. Berkeley, California
  7. Boulder, Colorado
  8. Burlington, Vermont
  9. Omaha, Nebraska
  10. Washington, D.C.

You can’t go wrong with Condé Nast and their Top 20 List for 2014 that has some overlap, but also expands the roster for a variety of reasons. For many, the fun of air travel has long since passed and tourism can overwhelm what was once a unique experience. We can all take heart in the fact that there are always new adventures off the beaten path as well as a wealth of gastronomic experiences to be had for foodies that love to travel all around the globe.