Best destinations for food

Hungary

The Danube splits the city in half and at night both banks glow, the parliament building lit gold on the Pest side, Buda Castle floating above the river like something left over from a grander era. Budapest smells like chimney cake and cigarette smoke near the ruin bars, and every third building is either crumbling beautifully or mid-renovation. It is the most dramatic city in Central Europe and it knows it.

Mexico

The altitude hits first, 2,240 metres, then the smell of corn tortillas on a comal somewhere just around the corner. Mexico City is a capital that operates at full intensity from 7am until 3am: baroque churches sinking into soft lakebed, street tacos that cost less than a newspaper, a metro system carrying five million people daily, and contemporary art museums that would embarrass most European cities.

Italy

A 50-kilometre stretch of cliff-hugging coastline south of Naples, where pastel towns like Positano and Amalfi tumble down to the sea. Lemon groves, winding coastal roads, and seafood define the southern Italian summer here.

Morocco

A former imperial city at the foot of Morocco's Atlas Mountains, built around a walled medieval medina of souks, palaces, and gardens. The main square, Jemaa el-Fnaa, shifts from market to open-air food court each evening.

Thailand

You smell it before you see it, incense and grilled pork and jasmine, drifting out of temple compounds and night market stalls in equal measure. Chiang Mai is northern Thailand's old walled capital, ringed by a moat and backed by forested mountains. Inside the old city, 300 temples compete for attention between coffee shops and massage parlours. Outside it, rice terraces step up into hill-tribe country. The pace is slower than Bangkok, the food is arguably better, and everything costs half as much.

Australia

The air is cold and smells like rain and eucalyptus even in summer. Tasmania is an island that didn't get the memo about tourist infrastructure: roads narrow to single lanes through ancient rainforest, dolerite columns rise out of sea mist on the southwest coast, and the silence in the interior is the kind that makes city people uncomfortable at first. Give it a day. Then you won't want to leave.

Malaysia

The Petronas Towers appear around corners when you least expect them, framed between colonial shophouses, rising above a wet market, reflected in a puddle after the 4pm downpour that arrives like clockwork. KL is a city of overlapping worlds: Malay, Chinese, Indian, colonial British, and gleaming glass towers, all compressed into a skyline that makes no visual sense but somehow works. The food is the real reason to come.

Italy

Italy's capital, where nearly 3,000 years of history layer together in plain sight. Ancient ruins like the Colosseum and Forum sit among baroque piazzas, fountains, and some of the country's most beloved food.

Australia

The coffee arrives before you've sat down properly, and the person who made it will have opinions about the bean origin. Melbourne runs on ritual: morning flat whites in laneways painted floor-to-ceiling by people who got paid nothing, lunch at a Vietnamese place in Footscray that seats twelve, footy on the weekend. It's the city Australians move to when Sydney starts feeling shallow.

Argentina

Dinner starts at 10pm and nobody thinks this is unusual. Buenos Aires runs on a schedule that makes no sense until you've been here a week and then makes all the sense in the world. Porteños argue about football and politics with the same intensity, the steak arrives on a wooden board with no apology for its size, and the city's European facades are slowly being repainted by street artists who have claimed every blank wall they can find.

Vietnam

At dusk the lanterns come on all at once, red, orange, yellow, reflecting in the Thu Bon river while motorbike horns fade and someone nearby is grilling something on a charcoal grate the size of a shoebox. Hoi An's Ancient Town is genuinely old, a 15th-century trading port where Japanese merchant houses and Chinese assembly halls sit shoulder to shoulder on streets too narrow for cars.

South Korea

The convenience stores never close and neither does the city. At 2am in Hongdae, university students eat tteokbokki from paper cups under neon signs while a busker covers a K-pop song badly and everyone sings along anyway. Seoul is 10 million people living at full speed, ancient palaces wedged between glass towers, street food alleys running under elevated highways, and a subway system that makes every other city's look embarrassing.