Opening the Kitchen

A librarian's habit is to write things down before they get away. That habit has served one project well enough; this is the same habit pointed somewhere else entirely — at roads, at tables, and at the small business of eating well in an unfamiliar place.

So: a notebook. Where we went. What we ate. What it cost, in money and in the kind of currency that doesn't show on a receipt — an hour queuing, a bus missed, an afternoon given over to a lunch that turned out to deserve it.

What goes in here

Entries, when there's something worth the entry. Not a schedule. A place that disappointed gets written up as honestly as one that didn't, because a notebook that only records the good meals is a menu, not a record.

• Photographs are mine unless a caption says otherwise.
• Nothing here is sponsored, comped, or affiliate-linked. If that ever changes, it'll say so at the top of the entry in question.
• Prices and hours were true the day they were written down and are probably already wrong. Check before you go.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

Brillat-Savarin wrote that in 1825, and then rather undercut it by spending four hundred pages on the physiology of taste. The short version is the better one, and it is as good a reason as any to keep this kind of record: the meals are not beside the point of a journey. Quite often they are the point, and the rest is travel arrangements.

A note on timing

Entries generally go up after the trip, not during it. Partly that's for the writing — a few days' distance is worth more than a same-day post. Mostly it's because an empty house doesn't need announcing.

Worth it? Ask again in a year. The kitchen's open; the first proper entry follows when there's a proper meal to report.

First published on Abroad, July 25, 2026.