How chefs find restaurants when they travel

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Chefs, they’re just like us! Except maybe when it comes to eating on their travels. Chefs tend to have better restaurant radars than the average civilian. René Redzepi does not bumble into a tourist-trap bistro next to the Eiffel Tower when he’s in Paris, and you shouldn’t have to, either.

We spoke with chefs Éric Ripert, Jenny Gao, Andy Ricker and Kris Yenbamroong about how they find the best food on the road, no matter where they are in the world.

Obsession drives it

It takes a true love for food to find the best of it.

“We live to eat. We travel to eat. And often, trips will happen around restaurant reservations,” says Jenny Gao, a chef-turned founder and CEO of the Sichuan spice company Fly By Jing. “I’m pretty obsessive about finding the right places to eat.”

That innate passion will make spending hours researching eating opportunities seem like a mandatory pre-travel activity. “It’s very time-consuming, but at the end, it’s worth it,” Gao says.

For Ripert, chef at Le Bernardin, travel is about the culture and discovering another part of the world. What that translates to: “I would say 80 percent of the time, it’s strictly about food.”

Find the right research tools

Yenbamroong, chef of Night+Market in Los Angeles, says he was late to the Internet party. He held on to his flip-phone long into the age of the smartphone. He used to value hitting the road with a physical map, stopping to talk to locals along the way to his points of interest.

“Honestly, that’s how I’ve met some of our best buddies overseas,” he says. But times change, and Yenbamroong now finds value in being online. He follows fellow chefs and food writers and food travelers on Instagram and saves posts of theirs that pique his interest. “I create a bank of screenshots of these places,” he says.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com

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