One of the hardest things to do when traveling alone is choosing a place to eat. If you’re in a small place, it’s not so tough, but in a city of any size, you’ll have hundreds of choices with nothing to thin the list. A large group can be helpful in winnowing — this person just had Thai yesterday, and that person is a vegetarian so doesn’t want to go for barbecue, and soon you’re left with just 2-3 logical choices. Alone, and unpicky, you might have 200.
I used to spend — waste — a lot of time on these decisions. I don’t tend to return to places, except for a couple of special ones. So if I’m in a mid-sized European city with dozens of good options, it’s hard to not feel I might be missing something special by choosing the restaurant with 4.4 stars instead of the one with 4.3. Sometimes I’d walk around for two hours trying to weigh the visual merits of the places around me. I like walking around neighborhoods, but this particular brand of aimlessness just felt stupid when I was already hungry.
So ten months before Covid closed the world, I found myself in Porto, Portugal. The first night I arrived, I was tired, so I walked three blocks downhill from where I was staying, and found a long street ranging down the hill that had about a dozen restaurants visible from one end. The one on the corner was praised by the other assholes on Google, so I went in and had a lovely meal in a crowd that was open and chatty like Americans. The waiter was headed to Istanbul for his honeymoon in two weeks; I plied him with recommendations. I stayed too late, and stumbled back.
And after just landing there with little effort and only one consultation to the mass wisdom of the Internets, I decided to make one element of my next six days in Portugal easy. The street looked full of nice places, with some variety in cuisine and style. So, I would just eat this street’s offerings, nowhere else. And I’d take it one step further, and not check the internet anymore.
And so I spent most of a week in Porto, working by the morning, touring the afternoons, and then enjoying dinner somewhere on Rua da Picaria. You can do much worse, and it took me all of ten minutes to find dinner each night. I had Chinese bao, Portuguese tinned fish, tapas from a menu that spanned the globe, and more. I never had trouble finding something I wanted to eat, and never had a bad meal. The rest of Porto spread around me, untouched except for breakfast, and it was just fine.
It can distort things a little. I ate one street in Munich and first believed it a city full of young people; only after day three did I realized I’d picked a street right between two large universities. And some places it’s just not possible with any sanity. Try to eat one calle in Venice and you’re likely signing up for six identical meals of often questionable quality; Venice is too touristy, so too many bad restaurants survive there without worry or hope of repeat business.
It also makes one realize just how much culture is built up around eating. In the USA you can, just by looking, understand the general quality of a restaurant, what type of food they serve, and the protocol for how to behave — do they seat you? Do you order at the counter? Most people would have a hard time explaining why they knew the drill. Abroad, all those cues are useless, and you either have to watch other people do it first, or ask and immediately brand yourself the dumb American. But it’s better to be the dumb American who asks politely, than the one who barges in.
And it’s always better to be the dumb American who just picks a damn place to eat than the one who circles around an entire neighborhood three times trying to decide what the absolute best restaurant is. There’s no such thing. You’re probably not going to find the restaurant of the 200 in Porto or Munich or Venice that is ideally suited to you. So just find the one that looks like it’ll make a soup you’ll remember.