Forget the Algorithm. Here's How to Actually Eat Well When You Travel.
Unpacked by Afar | Travel Smarter, More ResponsiblyShow Notes
Jennifer Hope Choi plans every trip the same way: open a Google doc, start with food, and build outward from there. As a former Bon Appétit editor, 13-year restaurant industry veteran, and author of a travel memoir, she has strong opinions about Michelin guides (skip ‘em), low-rated restaurants (sometimes worth it), and why you should always follow your optician's food recs.
She also edited Afar’s debut Travel to Eat series, which includes three stories: Jeju black pork and a life-changing soup, Sherpa cuisine in the Rockies, and why Portland, Maine, might be America’s best bakery town.
Meet today's guest
Jennifer Hope Choi is a senior editor at Afar and the architect of its Travel to Eat series. A former Bon Appétit editor and 13-year restaurant industry veteran, she is also an award-winning writer and author of the travel memoir the Wanderer’s Curse. Her work spans food and culture, and the messy, joyful overlap between the two.
In this episode
How Jen’s latchkey childhood, early Food Network shows, and her Korean grandmother’s pancakes shaped a lifelong obsession with eating
Why the Google doc comes first: Jen’s method for building food-forward itineraries from Reddit threads, local papers, and stranger recommendations
The case against Michelin stars, lines around the block, and treating a trip like a personality — and what to do instead
Inside the three stories of Afar’s Travel to Eat series: a transcendent bowl of Jeju black pork soup, Sherpa cuisine taking root in the Colorado Rockies, and the baking scene quietly transforming Portland, Maine
Jen’s #1 travel food tip: ask the shop clerk, not the algorithm
Links & resources
Read the Travel to eat series: America's best bakery town, a life-changing pork soup, and the rise of Sherpa cuisine in the Colorado Rockies
Read Jen's memoir, The Wanderer’s Curse
Follow Jen on Instagram
Read MFK Fisher's The Art of Eating, Jen’s favorite food book
Chapters
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:30 Growing Up Food-Obsessed
00:06:30 How to Eat Your Way Through a City
00:11:30 Lists, Stars, and Letting Go
00:21:30 The Travel to Eat Series
00:30:00 Tips for Eating Well on the Road
Be sure to subscribe to the show and sign up for our podcast newsletter, Behind the Mic, where we share upcoming news and behind-the-scenes details of each episode. And explore our second podcast, Travel Tales, which celebrates first-person narratives about the way travel changes us, and View From Afar, where we spotlight the people and ideas shaping the future of travel.
Unpacked by Afar is part of Airwave Media's podcast network. Please contact [email protected] if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Unpacked by Afar | Travel Smarter, More Responsibly
Welcome to episode three of a four-part Unpacked series on Dubai travel, this time focused on Dubai food: how a city long known for celebrity chefs and global concepts has grown a homegrown food scene with a flavor all its own.
In a new ongoing series, Afar is asking a deceptively simple question: What does a UNESCO World Heritage designation actually do? This episode starts in North Queensland, Australia, home to two UNESCO sites that sit side by side: the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics, which includes the Daintree Rainforest.
Welcome to episode two of a four-part Unpacked series on Dubai travel, this time focused on Dubai hospitality: how a city with more than 800 hotels and 150,000 rooms built a world-class hotel scene on one of the Arabian Peninsula’s oldest traditions: the welcome.
Welcome to episode one of a four-part Unpacked series on Dubai travel: the history, the ambition, and the glamorous, multicultural city it's become today.
Afar contributing writer Emma John road-trips the Great Victorian Bathing Trail, uncovering the best spa towns in Victoria, Australia—from thermal springs on the coast to century-old bathhouses inland.