On the slow pleasure of researching a city's food before you arrive — and why the notebook matters more than the algorithm.
There is a version of travel research that happens at a desk, in the early morning, with a good coffee and no particular urgency. This is the version I prefer. The other kind — the frantic scrolling on a phone outside a restaurant that closed six months ago — I have done enough of.
My process is slow by design. I open the laptop. I have a notebook beside it, the leather one that has been to twelve countries and smells accordingly. I start not with a search engine but with a name — someone whose taste I trust, a writer I have been reading for years, a friend who lived there once and ate well.
What I am looking for is not a list. Lists age badly and travel at the speed of trend. What I want is a single sentence from someone who noticed something specific: the way the light came through the window at that particular trattoria, the fact that the secondi are better than the primi, the detail that the owner is the fourth generation and it shows.
By the time I arrive somewhere, I usually have three or four places written in the notebook. Not starred on a map — written, by hand, with a note about why. This slows the process down in a way that turns out to be useful. Things you write down, you remember. Things you screenshot, you lose.
The coffee goes cold while I am doing this. I do not mind. The morning is the right time for it — unhurried, the day not yet requiring anything. It is, I have come to think, already part of the trip.