How You Eat Is How You Travel

If food and cuisine is the way of travel you chose, it is a good bet you belong to the generation of travelers Anthony Bourdain shaped. You already want to eat well in an unfamiliar place. The challenge is planning a trip that actually leads you there, without following the same trail everyone else is on.

In practice, that trail takes one of two forms. Either the trip gets planned around specific restaurants pulled from social media and review sites, with the whole itinerary locked before you land, or you arrive and open whatever app is nearest and follow the ratings to wherever everyone else is already eating.

For Scott Monaco, traveling for food means choosing a destination for its cuisine rather than its restaurants. It means going to Sichuan because you want to eat Sichuan food, then leaving the reservations mostly unmade: eating without a recommendation from a platform, and sometimes without knowing exactly what you have ordered.

The Global Chinese Restaurant Guide

Scott Monaco is building the first global guide to Chinese restaurants outside China. A guide to specific restaurants sits oddly next to everything written above, and the honest answer is that this project is a passion. The project comes from five years of living in Shanghai and a love of the food from China’s regional cuisines — Sichuan, Cantonese, Hunanese, Fujianese, Uyghur, and Dongbei, to name a few — and the entrepreneurial spirit of those who have been carrying it around the world for generations. That passion is widely shared, by travelers from China heading abroad and by plenty of people with no connection to China at all, and the guide exists to find those restaurants, catalog them, and make sure everyone knows they are there.

The project currently covers 451 awarded restaurants across 95 countries on two continents, with four more continents to come. Restaurants are selected through personal visits, diaspora community recommendations, and research across Chinese-language, English-language, and local-language review platforms. A restaurant awarded a lantern (🏮) is one worth a dedicated meal if you are anywhere in the area. The Africa guide and Asia guide are published, with Europe, Oceania, North America, and South America to come.

The essay The World’s Most Successful Brand Isn’t a Brand at All explores how Chinese restaurants became the most widely distributed food culture on earth without any corporate infrastructure behind it.

Stories from Scott Monaco

Contributor Mandy Sham‘s photo essay Sí, Con Todo from Mexico City captures the taco stands and market stalls where the food is inseparable from the neighborhood that produces it.

In Breakfast Is Included, Scott Monaco sits in a hotel breakfast room in Japan and watches what happens when a room full of travelers encounters a buffet.

Food Destinations to Start Thinking About

These are places where culinary traditions run deep and where most international travelers have not thought to look.

Rice and curry traditions across Sri Lanka — A single plate can hold fifteen preparations, each reflecting the island’s regional agriculture, spice production, and Tamil, Sinhalese, and Moorish influences.

Coffee tasting in Rwanda — In Kigali and the highlands beyond it, you can taste single-origin coffee at the farms where it was grown, watch the processing from cherry to cup, and drink some of the best coffee in the world.

Braai culture in South Africa — Every region does it differently, from the lamb and boerewors of the Western Cape to the peri-peri and seafood grills along the KwaZulu-Natal coast.

Night markets in Taipei, Taiwan — Raohe, Ningxia, just to name two, each with its own character and signature vendors that will bring you back evening after evening.

Street food in Penang, Malaysia — Char kway teow, assam laksa, and a food culture shaped by Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Peranakan traditions where the best meals are cooked by vendors who have been making one dish for decades.

Plov and bread culture in Samarkand, Uzbekistan — The Silk Road’s culinary crossroads, where the national rice dish and tandoor-baked non vary by city and family.

Seafood and ceviche along Colombia’s Caribbean coast — Cartagena and Santa Marta anchor a coastal food culture built on fresh catch, coconut rice, and Afro-Colombian flavors.

Spice-route cooking in Oman — Shuwa, halwa, and a food tradition shaped by centuries of Indian Ocean trade running through Muscat and the coast.

Where to Go Next

New stories from Scott Monaco are published weekly. Paid subscribers get access to the full interactive maps in the Chinese Restaurant Guide as new continents are published.

If food is driving your next trip, tell Scott Monaco where you want to eat.

More Ways to Travel

Explore how Scott Monaco travels: Food & Cuisine · Safari & Birding · Cultural Immersion · Photography · Cycling & Hiking · Solo Travel · Art & Artisan Craft · Books & Bookstores — or see all Ways to Travel.