48 Hours
Eating on a short trip without losing an afternoon to it
Meals take more of a weekend than anybody plans for. The fix is deciding when you eat, not agonising over where.
Comparisons of meals on a short trip usually pick a winner. This one picks the circumstances, which is more useful.
The difference in one place
- Meals eat several hours of a two-night trip once waiting and deciding are counted.
- Eating at local off-peak hours removes most of the waiting on a busy weekend.
- Decide the timing in advance and leave the choice of place until you are there.
Meals are the largest unplanned block
People budget carefully for museums and transfers and then lose several hours across a weekend to eating, waiting and deciding where to eat. The deciding is the expensive part, because a hungry group standing on a street corner comparing options can burn a genuinely significant stretch of an evening.
Waiting is the second cost, and on a Saturday evening in a busy district it is rarely a short wait. Neither of these is about the food, which means both can be reduced without eating anything worse than you otherwise would. Treating meals as scheduled blocks rather than as gaps between activities recovers more time than almost any other change to a short itinerary.
Timing beats choosing
Every place has hours when its restaurants are busy and hours when they are not, and those hours differ considerably between countries. Eating an hour before or after the local peak generally means walking in without a wait, and often a calmer room as well.
Learning the local rhythm takes one question to anybody who lives there, and it is the single most useful thing to ask on arrival. Doing this also aligns your day with the place rather than with the habits you brought, which is part of why you came. The corollary is that arriving at the peak without a reservation is a decision to spend part of the evening standing up.
Reserve the one meal that matters
A single booked meal gives a weekend an anchor and removes the worst of the deciding, without turning the trip into a schedule. Put it on the evening you will be most tired, which is usually the second, when the willingness to search has run out. Leave the other meals entirely open, because a trip in which every meal is booked has no room left for anything spontaneous.
Where a place requires booking well ahead, decide early whether it is genuinely the reason for the trip or merely an option. If it is not the reason, let it go, because arranging a weekend around a table is a poor use of two nights.
Breakfast is the leak
Breakfast is the meal most likely to consume an hour of the best part of the day, when light is good and sites are quiet. Somewhere that opens early and serves quickly is worth more on a short trip than somewhere celebrated that opens late. Buying something the night before and eating it while walking converts that hour back into time on the ground.
In practice, this is one of the few places where a small compromise on quality buys a disproportionate amount of trip.
It matters most on the single full day, where the difference between starting at eight and starting at ten is most of a morning.
Eating near where you already are
Crossing a city for a specific meal costs the journey twice and usually lands you somewhere you have no other reason to be. Choosing from whatever is around the area you are already exploring keeps the day continuous rather than breaking it into trips. Busy districts near major sites are the exception, since prices and waits both rise where the customers are all leaving anyway.
Put simply, walking a few streets away from the obvious square generally solves that without needing any research at all. The rule that survives everywhere is to eat near where you want to be next, rather than where you have just been.
Some of this will suit you and some will not, and that is the point.
Dietary needs and short trips
Specific requirements are much easier to handle when the language and the local conventions are understood before you land. Writing the requirement down in the local language, and carrying it, removes a repeated negotiation from every meal of the weekend.
On an ordinary week, where a requirement is medical rather than a preference, plan it properly and take advice from your own clinician before travelling. Some cuisines make certain requirements straightforward and others make them constant work, which is worth knowing when choosing between destinations. For a two-night trip, choosing a place where eating is easy is a reasonable criterion rather than a compromise.
Side by side
| Consideration | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Meals are the largest unplanned block | Meals eat several hours of a two-night trip once waiting and deciding are counted. |
| Timing beats choosing | Eating at local off-peak hours removes most of the waiting on a busy weekend. |
| Reserve the one meal that matters | Decide the timing in advance and leave the choice of place until you are there. |
The takeaway
Fix when you eat and let where sort itself out.
Small and repeatable beats ambitious and abandoned, almost every time.
Questions readers ask
Should I book restaurants before I go?
One is usually enough. It anchors the weekend and covers the evening you will be too tired to search, while leaving the rest open.
How do I avoid tourist-trap streets?
Walk a few minutes away from the main square or site. Prices and waits both fall quickly once you leave the street everyone exits onto.
