Editor’s Letter: More Than Ever, We’re Hungry for New Experiences

I bet you all know the experience of staying in the midst of some regular action when abruptly a lengthy-neglected memory pierces your consciousness, arriving with this sort of urgency and clarity that it feels like it must be hoping to tell you one thing. Several months into the pandemic, I commenced acquiring this expertise with recollections of food I have eaten all over the world. On a prolonged push, all I could think about was fiery tacos in an open up-air industry in Mérida, Mexico. Cleaning the kitchen, I flashed to a hearty bowl of gukbap, a rice soup with pork bone, that I inhaled in a brightly lit alley in Busan, South Korea. In the park with the young children, I remembered the lángos—hubcap-size discs of fried bread topped with potatoes and cheese—that we requested on the shores of Lake Balaton, in Hungary. Often I would recall meals at fancy eating places, like wild boar at Steirereck in Vienna’s Stadtpark on one pre-young children vacation with my spouse, or the popular ants and Amazon River fish I ate on a solo reservation at D.O.M. in São Paulo. But additional normally I identified I yearned for individuals humbler culinary experiences that designed me sense like component of the cloth of a place.

I was hungry—not just for the flavors of the environment, but for the feeling that only foodstuff can offer of staying transported and linked. I guess you’ve got felt that hunger by yourself about the previous two a long time. Even if you might be not the type of traveler who helps make cafe reservations before reserving your lodges, I’m certain your palate guides at minimum some of your vacation planning. Irrespective of whether you might be still figuring out what to do this summer months or concocting schemes for up coming calendar year, enable this issue’s exploration of the evolving foodstuff cultures of some of our favorite places, enable you make your mind up wherever to go. From pumpkin soup with mussels in Luberon, France, and jerk pork cooked above pimento wooden in Boston Bay, Jamaica, to pastry pockets of spiced lamb at an Ethiopian restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, there’s a food here to feed your soul.

This write-up appeared in the July/August 2021 difficulty of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the journal right here.