How to find the food locals actually eat

The gap between the best meal on a trip and the worst is almost never about money. It is about information - and specifically about whether you ate where people who live there eat, or where people who are leaving in three days eat.

These signals work almost everywhere, and they take about ninety seconds to read.

The signals that actually correlate with good food

• A short menu. Six dishes means six dishes done repeatedly. Eighty dishes means a freezer.
• A queue of people not holding cameras. This is the single most reliable indicator on the planet. Locals queue for value; visitors queue for reputation.
• Turnover. Full at the local eating hour, empty an hour later, is a very good sign. Half full all day is not.
• The dish the place is named after. If the sign says the name of a soup, order the soup.
• Visible cooking. Open kitchens, grills on the street, a woman rolling something at the front. Confidence is a signal.
• Handwritten or chalked specials. Something changed today, which means something is fresh.

The signals that mean walk on

• Photographs of every dish, in six languages. The menu is designed for people who will not come back.
• Somebody outside trying to bring you in. Good restaurants do not need a doorman.
• A view of the single most famous thing in the city. You are paying for the view, and you will get exactly that.
• Cuisine sprawl. Pizza, sushi, curry and burgers on one menu is a kitchen with a microwave.
• Empty at the hour everyone else is full. The locals know something.

Eat at the local hour, not yours

This single adjustment fixes more bad meals than any other. In Spain, a restaurant serving dinner at seven is serving tourists; the kitchen wakes up at nine. In much of Latin America the main meal is lunch and the evening is light. In Japan the best ramen counters sell out by early afternoon. In Kerala, the fish came in this morning and anyone offering ceviche-fresh seafood late in the evening is telling you it did not.

Find out when people eat and go then. You will wait longer and eat considerably better.

Markets: the fastest route to the real thing

A market solves the problem in one move. Everyone is standing, nobody is on a date, prices are visible, and the cooking happens in front of you. Some rules that travel well:

• Do a full lap before buying anything. You will always find a better version at the far end.
• Eat where the traders eat, at the hour they eat. Market workers get one break and they do not waste it.
• Order what is already on the counter rather than asking for something to be made. It is fresher and faster.
• High turnover beats refrigeration. A busy stall selling the same thing all morning is safer than a quiet one with a fridge.
• Go early. Produce markets are largely finished by nine; some, like the animal market in Otavalo, are done by then entirely.

Asking the right question

"Where's a good restaurant?" gets you sent to the place that is good for foreigners. Better questions:

• Where do you eat lunch on a work day?
• What should I eat here that I cannot eat anywhere else?
• If your family came to visit, where would you take them?

Ask the person on the hotel desk and you get the hotel's answer. Ask the taxi driver, the person at the bakery counter, the shop owner two streets from the square, and you get a different, better answer. In Ghana we asked for directions and were served lunch; the same instinct exists nearly everywhere, and it is activated by curiosity rather than by a tip.

Ordering when you do not share a language

• Point at what somebody else is eating. Universally understood, universally well received.
• Learn four words: hello, thank you, delicious, and the local word for "the same". They do more work than a phrasebook.
• Take a photo of any dish you loved and show it in the next town. Regional names differ; pictures do not.
• Say what you cannot eat, in writing, in the local language. Allergies do not survive mime.

The etiquette that matters

Small things carry a lot of weight and they vary. Tipping is expected in the United States, unusual in Japan where it can cause genuine offence, and rounded up in much of Europe. In Uzbekistan, bread is never placed upside down and never cut with a knife. In Ethiopia, refusing the third round of the coffee ceremony is a small insult. In Singapore, a packet of tissues on a table means the table is taken, and breaking that rule once is enough to learn it.

None of this needs studying in advance. It needs watching for the first ten minutes and copying what everyone else does.

The one meal worth planning

Most meals should be found rather than booked. But most places have one thing that genuinely requires a reservation, a season or a specific address - a single restaurant, a market that only runs on Saturdays, a dish that sells out. Identify that one thing before you go and book it. Then leave the other twenty meals to the signals above, which is where the good stories come from anyway.

And when something is very good, ask for the recipe. You will be given a list of ingredients with no quantities, it will take eleven attempts, and it will still not be right. That is the correct outcome.