Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.
In this issue
This issue is the first we’ve built entirely around a single idea: food is the point of the trip, not a pleasure you get to once you arrive. Reader feedback has been clear: it’s the part of travel they’re most excited about. It also introduces Fork First, a new section on the places worth traveling to eat.
In The Dispatch, a week in Morocco, and the case for reserving the restaurants before the hotels. Fork First begins with Rodriguez Barbacoa in San Miguel de Allende, where a pit, a broth, and a town are built around a single meal. A Chosen Place makes the argument for San Sebastián as a city organized around food. The Vantage takes on the restaurant industry’s solo diner problem. Further Afield offers five reads, including Italy’s first UNESCO designation for Italian cuisine and a pintxo walking route through San Sebastián.
Dispatch
Where Travel and Life Intersect
Plan the Meals First
On food as the point of the trip
When someone tells me about a trip they just took, I don’t ask where they went or what they saw.
I ask what they ate.
You can tell a lot from the answer. Some people pause before they respond. They’re the ones who remember the dish, the conversation. The ones for whom a meal isn’t a break between things, but the point of the day.
For many of us, food is not just part of how we travel.
It is how we travel.
Plan Around the Table
This is why, when we plan a trip, we plan the food first.
Before the hotels, before the itinerary, we know where we want to eat. At lunch, I’m already thinking about dinner. If the choice on a given afternoon comes down to one more sight or a meal we’ve been thinking about, the meal usually wins.
Marrakesh
A friend who had been to Marrakesh several times sent a Google Doc before we left. Her group had built it over a couple of years, adding to it after every visit.
Thirty-five entries.
Five were sights. The rest were restaurants.
These were my kind of travelers.
We spent an afternoon going through the list. The sights we could figure out as we went. The restaurants needed a plan. Half required reservations, which we made.
I am not, by nature, a planner. But with four people, limited days, and a city like Marrakesh, you need a little alignment before you land. So we built a loose structure around the meals.
Which, in the end, is what we would have done anyway.
We saw what we needed to see. Bahia Palace. Majorelle Garden. The madrasa. We walked the medina, got turned around more than once, and eventually stopped trying to find our way through it with any confidence.
We also ate well. Nomad on the rooftop, the medina spread out below. A long dinner at La Mamounia, the kind of place so enchanting that you almost forget to pay attention to the food.
The meals were good. Some were very good. None of them is what I remember.
The Gazelles
It was a Tuesday afternoon in the souk. Two hours of walking the derbs, the narrow lanes that wind through the medina with no real logic to them. At some point, you stop trusting your sense of direction and just follow whoever is in front of you.
Everyone was tired. And hot. And hungry.
We pulled out the list. Nothing nearby.
So we opened Google Maps. A place called La Cantine des Gazelles was four minutes away. The reviews, in English and French, were glowing. We had never heard of it.
I almost didn’t go in. Gazelles, I thought. What exactly are they serving?
Cornes de gazelle are the crescent-shaped almond pastries you find in every Moroccan patisserie. In French slang, a gazelle is a beautiful young woman.
Neither seemed likely to be on the menu.
It took about thirty seconds inside to understand.
The place is simple. Pink walls, open air, a few blocks from Jemaa el-Fna. Tables filled with Moroccans and visitors in equal measure.
We ordered without much discussion. Chicken tagine. Lamb. A vegetarian dish. Couscous.
Everything that came out was better than expected. Put down your fork and smile kind of better.
The couscous was deeper, more spiced than anything I had eaten before. The tagine was more flavorful than anything we’d eaten in the polished kitchens. At some point, the owner sent over fresh strawberry juice for the table.
At the end of the meal, one of us said we should come back the next day and order everything we missed.
We had a reservation that night. One of the harder ones to get.
We canceled it. Went back to the Gazelles. Just as good.
When we got home, the four of us went to a French-Moroccan place to stretch the trip a little longer.
Halfway through, someone said it.
I wish we were back at the Gazelles.
— Paul M. Rand, Founder, Nomadic Spirit
A Chosen Place
Destinations worth traveling for—and understanding once you arrive
San Sebastián, Spain
A Chosen Place asks us to pick one. For a food issue, that is the hard part. Food travel is everywhere. Bologna, Oaxaca, Hanoi, Lyon. Every region has a case.
But there are towns where the food is the whole reason to go.
San Sebastián is one of those towns. People book the same week each year, walk into the same bars, and know the bartenders by name.
Nineteen Michelin stars in a city of 186,000. Three three-star restaurants. Over two hundred pintxo bars are concentrated in the old town, the Parte Vieja. The numbers are familiar to anyone who has read about the place. They don’t explain why people keep going back.
Marti Buckley, an American chef who has lived in San Sebastián since 2010 and published The Book of Pintxos in 2024, says, “Like no other culture I know, they’re just obsessed with what they eat.”
The ritual is the pintxo crawl, or txikiteo. You stand at the bar, you order one or two small bites, you drink something small with them, and you move on. Regulars repeat the order each time.
The gilda is the original pintxo. Three things on a toothpick: a manzanilla olive, a salt-cured anchovy, a pickled guindilla pepper. Named for the Rita Hayworth character because it is verde, picante, salado. Green, spicy, salty. One bite.
Bar Nestor makes two tortillas de patata a day. One at lunch, one at dinner. Sixteen slices each. The kitchen opens an hour before service to take names, and the slices go out in the order people arrive. The tortilla is made with potatoes and caramelized onions, held together by barely cooked eggs. The outside has a crust. The middle stays soft.
La Viña’s cheesecake is the last stop in most crawls. Burnt on top, almost liquid in the middle. The recipe is not a secret. Writers have been bringing it home for a decade and putting it in their own ovens.
Charlie Brown, a food writer who has been returning to San Sebastián for six years, publishes a food and wine Substack called The Sauce. “San Sebastián does things to people,” he has written. “They call it a pilgrimage. They get misty-eyed when they tell you about their time there.”
There is a second structure beneath the bars. The txoko. Private cooking clubs, most of them more than a century old, many still men-only. Members have keys. They cook for each other, eat together, and bring guests when the rules allow it.
Between the pintxo crawl and the txoko, the city is organized around return.
Fork First
The Dish. The Place. The reason to Go.
Restaurants, dishes, and tables worth planning a trip around. If you have one worth sharing, please write to [email protected] for submission guidelines.
Rodríguez Barbacoa | San Miguel de Allende, México
Barbacoa is everywhere in Mexico. You can find some version of it in almost any market, any town, any Sunday morning worth getting up for. Which makes the question not whether to eat it, but where. After twenty-five years of having a home in San Miguel de Allende, the answer for us has never changed.
Rodriguez Barbacoa sits in an open cinder-block building behind a Pemex gas station. It started years ago as a canopy over some tables. The building came later.
The lamb goes into the pit the night before. A hole in the ground, stones heated until they glow, the meat wrapped in maguey leaves. The pit gets sealed and the lamb cooks in its own heat and juice for hours, low and slow, until the morning. What comes out is falling-apart tender, rich, crisp at the edges.
You order from a woman behind a small wooden table near the entrance. By the kilo, or a portion of one. While she writes it down, you watch the butchers behind her working the meat, chopping and arranging it into portions, fast and certain, no wasted motion. At the back of the room, women are pressing tortillas one by one on a hand press, each hitting the comal with a soft slap, puffing, and then stacking them in a cloth. Oranges are being cut and squeezed.
Everything comes to the table, family-style. The tortillas arrive hot to the touch. The meat comes piled in a plastic basket lined with foil. On the side: diced white onion, fresh cilantro, and salsa. A chipped mug of consomme, the broth that dripped off the lamb overnight into a pot below the pit, cooked down with potatoes and onion until it is dark. To drink: Coke, or agua de jamaica, or fresh orange juice squeezed while you watch.
You eat at white plastic tables on white plastic chairs, the kind that say Corona on them. Some Sundays, we order large quesadillas and pile on the meat. Nobody blinks.
Go on a Sunday morning after the churches let out. The crowd is the whole point. Families in good clothes, workers, regulars who were coming here when it was still just a canopy. San Miguel has gotten fancier over the years, pulled upscale by too many design hotels. Rodriguez feels untouched by it.
Rodríguez Barbacoa, San Miguel de Allende. Sunday mornings. Cash. Get there early.
Nomadic Spirit wants your stories!
The most useful travel writing comes from people who actually go. Readers like you. People who have been somewhere long enough to know what’s worth coming back for, or who turned down a familiar street and found something they couldn’t stop thinking about.
Two places in Nomadic Spirit where your voice belongs:
The Journey. A trip that mattered. Personal, specific, in your own voice. Debbie’s piece is the model.
Fork First. One dish, one place, one reason to go. The test is simple. Would you go back for it? Would you tell everyone heading to that city to find it?
Write to [email protected], and we’ll send the guidelines.
The Vantage
What the travel industry gets right—and wrong—for Nomadic Spirits |
Will Anyone Be Joining You?
The restaurant industry has a solo diner problem.
This issue of Nomadic Spirit argues that food should be a key, if not the key, focus of personal travel. Plan the meals first. Choose the destination for the table. And on a business trip, a good dinner at a restaurant you had reserved in advance is a recognition and reward for everything else the day asked of you.
Most restaurants aren’t cooperating. Menus are built for sharing. Tables are sized for couples. The solo traveler gets the seat at the bar, the two top by the kitchen, or the greeting at the door: “Will anyone be joining you?”
Restaurants weren’t built for this, and it is beginning to show. Booking.com reports the share of travelers planning solo trips jumped from 14 percent pre-pandemic to 23 percent. OpenTable says solo reservations grew 4 percent year over year, the largest increase of any party size. And solo travelers spend more of their trip budget on food than on transportation or lodging. The seats aren’t designed for the customers who are showing up.
Travelers feel it first. Many solo travelers default to room service or the hotel bar, skipping the restaurant they came to the city to try. A discouraging welcome at the door is enough to push someone back to the hotel for the night. The trip loses its best meal.
A few places are doing this right. Ichiran in Tokyo built private booths for one person each, each with a small window for food delivery. Penny in New York is all counter seating. Avant Garden in Manhattan built a dedicated solo table and a four-course menu to match. Every sushi counter has always known what the rest of the industry is slowly discovering.
Solo travelers know what they want.
Further Afield
Reading worth your time.
This issue’s reads follow the thread.
Italian Cuisine Becomes World’s First to be Awarded UNESCO Status — CNN, December 2025
The UN named Italian cuisine the first full national food culture on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The citation is not about recipes. It is about what happens around the table, which is the same argument this issue has been making.
16 Michelin-Approved Food Destinations for 2026 — CNN, January 2026
Michelin’s 2026 travel picks include Venice, the Amalfi Coast, Vancouver, Cappadocia, Jiangsu Province in China, and Cebu in the Philippines. A useful map of where the food-first traveler is going this year. Not every pick lands, but the list is worth reading against your own instincts.
The Pintxo Bars I Can’t Live Without in San Sebastián — Saveur, 2024
Marti Buckley’s roadmap through her adopted city. Fourteen years of living there compressed into a walking route from La Concha to the Parte Vieja to her own neighborhood, Gros. A companion piece to A Chosen Place this issue.
Why Is Women-Only Group Travel Suddenly So Popular? — JourneyWoman, January 2026
Intrepid Travel reported a 59 percent jump in Women’s Expeditions bookings between 2024 and 2025. Insight Vacations launched women-only trips to 11 destinations. UK-based Solos Holidays opened its first women-only itineraries after forty years. The piece reports a market reaching what one operator calls “wildfire” stage after a long slow burn.
Best of the World 2026 — National Geographic, February 2026
National Geographic’s annual list of 25 destinations picked by its explorers, photographers, and editors. This year: Spain’s Basque Country beyond the total solar eclipse, a new coast-to-coast trail in South Korea, Route 66 at 100, Oulu as Europe’s 2026 Capital of Culture, and Nibiischii National Park in Quebec, the first in Canada managed by a First Nation.
"First we eat, then we do everything else."
— M.F.K. Fisher
