Then a friend dragged me to a three-star Michelin restaurant in Italy last year. It completely ruined cheap food for me.
The last time I did a budget "food tour" in Rome, it was just terrible. If you haven't done one... they just pack twenty of you into a group and walk you around a crowded market. The guide hands you a cold slice of pizza and a tiny cup of cheap wine. You spend three hours standing on the sidewalk listening to someone shout over the street noise. And when you finally sit down somewhere, you end up in the middle of a traffic jam of other tourists just to eat average pasta.
If we wanted to get a real dinner later, it was this whole event. You scroll through Google Maps, find some tourist trap with four stars, and stand outside for an hour just to get a bad steak. You basically spend your whole vacation frustrated that you didn't plan ahead.
Another thing about the cheap tours is the constant rushing around. The restaurants have strict table limits. They literally hand you the bill the second you finish your last bite. So the waiter is going to make damn sure you are moving on time, no matter what you are doing. You spend half the evening looking at your watch instead of enjoying the wine.
And the food is just always fine. Never great. Just fine. Stale bread, a weird buffet of lukewarm options, instant coffee. It’s fine for two days, and then it just gets exhausting.
I was expecting high-end food travel to feel pretentious. I figured it was basically just tiny portions of foam on a giant white plate. I thought it would feel fake and I'd leave hungry.
It wasn't. The whole vibe is totally different. There wasn’t any rushing or crowded lobbies.
When we walked into the Michelin place, they didn’t just point us to a table. The chef walked out to our table, poured some crazy expensive Barolo, and casually talked to us about the guy down the road who grew our tomatoes. Nobody rushed us.
There wasn't really a schedule. No waiters rushing to turn the table over for the next guests. We just sat there on our own time for four hours eating the best food of my life.
What You Actually Get for the Money
The restaurants at this level are... insane. It's not just a dinner. It's basically a massive, private three-hour show. You don't usually order off a normal menu. You get a tasting menu, which means the chef just brings you twelve small courses of whatever is freshest that day. You taste things you didn't even know existed.
Also, it’s completely personalized. You don't have waiters ignoring you. We had a sommelier just standing nearby, pouring a new wine for every single plate. He handed me this weird white wine from Sicily that somehow made the fish taste completely different. And the waiters just magically refill your water without you ever asking.
But honestly, it solves the biggest problem with traveling: eating bad food.
On a normal trip, you waste so much money on mediocre meals. On a luxury culinary trip, you know exactly why you are paying. The service is ridiculous. You just sit back and let them handle everything.
Like Massimo Bottura’s place in Italy. He just serves you Parmigiano cheese made five different ways on one plate. You think it's a joke until you actually eat it. You literally can't eat this anywhere else on earth. Getting a table takes months of planning, but when you finally sit down, it is absolutely flawless.
The Reality of Planning It
Getting a table at these places is a massive headache, though.
You literally have to sit at your computer at midnight exactly three months before your trip. You click refresh, and if you're ten seconds late, the entire restaurant is booked out.
I actually prefer booking private culinary guides and food tours instead of just fighting for restaurant reservations. Don't bother with the large group tours. Just hand some cash to a local to walk you around.
A friend hooked us up with this sushi chef in Tokyo. He didn't put us in a classroom. He just locked the door to his tiny restaurant, handed us some knives, and showed us how to slice the tuna ourselves. We drank his sake and ate whatever we managed to make.
In Tuscany, I just paid a local driver to take us to some vineyards. No big tour buses. The guy just picked us up at our villa, drove us to a completely private vineyard, and the owner opened rare bottles for us right in his living room. The logistics are completely handled for you. No waiting in lines. No looking at maps.
What Nobody Tells You About Food Resorts
Staying at a normal hotel is annoying. You wake up, go down to a sad breakfast buffet, and eat cold eggs while fighting fifty other people for the coffee machine.
If you really care about food, you have to book a luxury culinary resort. These are five-star hotels built entirely around what you eat.
We once stayed at this tiny estate in France. The kitchen guys didn't even have a set menu—they'd just wander out into the garden, rip up whatever was ripe, and cook it right there. No fake marketing, just actual fresh food.
You wake up and there's hot espresso and croissants waiting outside your door. The rest of the day is just you wandering around the olive trees or watching the chef prep dinner.
It completely ruins normal hotels. Standard five-star room service feels like absolute garbage after you've stayed at a place run by a Michelin chef. Just make sure you bring loose pants.
A Normal Day Doing This
The daily routine of a premium food trip is pretty straightforward. Let's say you are doing seven days in Paris.
They wake you up before nine. You grab a quick espresso at some tiny bakery the hotel told you about. You ignore the museums completely. Instead, you just walk through the local meat market with a chef pointing out which truffles to buy.
By the afternoon, you're usually so full you just end up sitting at a cafe drinking wine and watching people walk by.
Then you go back out at 8 PM for a massive three-star Michelin dinner. You spend four hours eating incredible food. Then sleep. Repeat for a week.
There are also just basic rules you have to follow. If you show up to a three-star restaurant in cargo shorts, they will literally lock the door on you. You have to dress well.
And for photos, just put your phone away. I finally caved and just stopped taking pictures of every plate. You really just have to sit there and eat it while it's hot. The chef worked hard on it. People who get obsessed with getting the perfect Instagram angle let their food get cold and miss all the good stuff.
The Final Bill
The price tag is going to hurt. You're dropping serious cash per meal.
A week eating like this in Tokyo cost me more than my last used car. Honestly, the wine pairings alone still make me wince.
But when you look at where the money goes, it makes sense. It’s the ingredients. You are basically paying for the logistics of getting a fresh truffle dug out of the ground and put on your plate.
But you actually remember the trip. A cheap pizza in a tourist trap is forgotten the next day. Sitting in a private cellar in Tuscany drinking wine is something you actually remember.
Look, everyone travels differently.
If you literally just want to grab a quick scoop of gelato near the Colosseum and move on, then yeah, save your money. Nothing wrong with that.
I'm just completely done wasting my time on bad pizza. Every time I tried to budget my meals in Europe, I just felt gross and annoyed the whole trip.
It completely ruins your tolerance for being miserable, though. You eventually realize you don't actually have to eat bad food just to save some money. I don't even look at the menu prices anymore. I just pay it. I'd rather spend the money to sit at a quiet table with a perfect glass of wine and not deal with anyone else.
