The Restaurants Worth Building Your Entire Holiday Around

The serious food traveller has always existed. What's different now is the planning. Flights to Copenhagen are routinely booked six months in advance of a Noma reservation. People fly into San Sebastian on a Friday night, eat at Arzak on Saturday, and are back at their desks on Monday having spent the equivalent of a package holiday on three meals. Nobody questions this anymore. It is an entirely legitimate use of a long weekend

The question worth asking is whether you actually have to book the world's most decorated restaurant to have that experience. The answer, happily, is no.

The best meal is not always the most famous one. It is often the one you were not expecting.

France remains the most reliable country in the world for the kind of lunch that makes you reconsider your life. Not Paris, necessarily. Lyon, which considers itself the gastronomic capital of France with considerable justification, has bouchons, small traditional estaurants serving quenelles and andouillette

and pot-au-feu, that are booked entirely by locals and cost less than a mediocre pizza elsewhere.

In Japan, the concept of the food pilgrimage is built into the culture. Ramen shops with a single item on the menu. Sushi counters with eight seats and a three-hour experience. Tempura restaurants where the chef has been perfecting one technique for thirty years. You do not need a Michelin star to guide you. You need a local, or a very good food writer.

Closer to home, the argument for building a long weekend around a restaurant is increasingly easy to make. Scotland now has more serious destination restaurants per capita than almost anywhere in Europe. The Kitchin in Edinburgh, Inver on the banks of Loch Fyne, and Restaurant Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles are all worth the journey from London, and none requires an international flight.