One of the joys of travel is sampling dishes with a true sense of place—cuisine you can’t get anywhere else (and often can’t find without a guide). That might mean street food that’s attracted lines of hungry fans to the same stall for decades or a local chef who perfected recipes for years before opening their own spot.
Restaurants of all kinds around the world are increasingly turning hyper-local ingredients into meals that are a direct expression of the place that produced them. And perhaps the best way to discover those places is on a tour led by an expert who knows where to look.
The Global Kitchen video series from the United States Tour Operators Association (USTOA) does exactly that, following chefs and local guides through the markets and kitchens of Québec City, Canada; Cali, Colombia; and Chongqing, China, three cities where the best restaurants draw on the local culture and ingredients grown nearby to put something distinct on the plate.
USTOA tour operators can help arrange a trip to these destinations, and more. And once you’re back home, the accompanying Global Kitchen Cookbook featuring recipes from these destinations and others like Buenos Aires, Calgary, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Madrid, Malta, Türkiye, and the Yucatán, lets you recreate the dishes you ate along the way, with recipes from each city that help you relive the travel experience. In the meantime, here’s what to eat, drink, and seek out when you get there.
Eat maple taffy and grilled cheese in Québec City
Pulling maple taffy in Québec City
Photo by © GouvQc/Francis Gagnon
The distinctive French heritage of Québec thrives amid nature’s full seasonal palette—crisp, joyful winters perfect for “winterapy,” and warm, radiant summers. Maple groves yield the province’s most iconic ingredient, and the Saint Lawrence River, running straight through Québec City, teems with walleye and trout. Over time, settlers adapted to the conditions with hearty dishes like tourtière, a spiced meat pie that’s perfect for the coldest months, and pouding chômeur, a humble cake soaked in maple syrup.
In the USTOA’s Global Kitchen video featuring Québec City, food columnist Allison Van Rassel takes viewers through the cobblestoned streets of the Petit-Champlain neighborhood, where Rebecca McWhirter pulls maple taffy over fresh snow at her shop La Petite Cabane à Sucre de Québec, which specializes in maple products.
From there, you can head into the Limoilou quarter, where Chez Maude makes a grilled cheese stuffed with Charlevoix cheese and sautéed apple, tucked inside a crisp gaufrette (waffle). And downtown on Rue Saint-Joseph, La Baraque à Frites cooks up its famous Gerry Burger (named after beloved Québécois rock singer Gerry Boulet): a fried chicken sandwich on a grilled brioche bun, loaded with crispy bacon, pickles, and Buffalo mayo sauce.
In the same neighborhood, you’ll find La Souche. The active microbrewery and restaurant serves pub food made with local ingredients and craft beers brewed in-house, all in a setting that feels like a classic Québécois outfitter lodge—rustic, welcoming, and deeply local.
Visitors to Québec City will also want to pop into Giacomo et Tania, a charcuterie and cheese shop in the Saint-Sauveur neighborhood, run by an Italian couple who relocated from Montreal. Giacomo personally selects products tied to his southern Italian roots, including cured meats, Italian and Québécois cheeses, burrata, and high-quality olive oils.
About 20 minutes outside the city, in the village of Stoneham, Pascal Le Boulanger turns out legendary baguettes and croissants from an open kitchen where customers can watch the dough being rolled and shaped. A Frenchman, who arrived in Québec and never went home, runs the bakery.
Consider also making a detour to Dépanneur Alphé Picard in Wendake, a First Nations community just outside Québec City. The historic store sells Indigenous food products that tell their own distinct story about the region.
Or, if you’d like to try a snack with some local flavor, stop at La Place, affectionately known as Québec City’s “King of Chips,” thanks to its huge selection of regional and international flavors, from Île d’Orléans to Spain, France, and England. Try a local favorite that’s become a Canadian classic, ketchup chips.
Feast on empanadas and pandebono cake in Cali
A view of Cali, Colombia
Courtesy of ProColombia
Known worldwide as the salsa capital, the city of Cali in Colombia’s Pacific region also has a strong reputation for its food. Cali’s location in Valle del Cauca, a region that stretches from the Pacific coastline to the Andean foothills, gives cooks access to a huge wealth of distinctive ingredients.
Like in USTOA’s Global Kitchen video, start any trip to learn more about the food of Cali at La Alameda Market, where vendors fry valluno-style empanadas that come out smaller and crispier than versions found anywhere else in the country. From the market, stop next at Domingo, a restaurant where chef Catalina Vélez specializes in innovative contemporary Colombian cuisine using locally sourced ingredients.
At Ringlete Restaurant, chef Martha Cecilia Jaramillo has earned a following for cooking that wastes nothing by turning what other kitchens might throw away into something you should make a point to order. Her torta de pandebono takes leftover pandebono, a local cheese bread, and reworks it into a cake finished with fresh cheese and orange zest.
Fruit for sale at La Alameda Market
Courtesy of ProColombia
In the San Antonio neighborhood, restaurants Waunana and Baraka each approach local produce through the lens of the Sabores Bio initiative, a network of restaurants committed to local sourcing and fair pay for producers. And in the surrounding streets, coffee shops allow you to experience Colombia’s coffee culture, where the tradition of visiting farms and picking coffee still runs deep.
Visit Viche Positivo for a night out. Musician Nidia Góngora has run this small bar and kitchen since 2011, serving food and drink from the Colombian Pacific coast, where she grew up. The menu includes dishes like tapao de pescado, a fish stew; and fried plantains with fresh cheese, alongside pours of viche, a sugarcane spirit.
If you’re looking to extend your trip to explore even more of Colombia’s food scene, consider Bogotá, where the restaurants Leo and El Chato have created dishes that showcase Colombia’s bounty for years. Chef Jaime Rodríguez of Celele in Cartagena has done the same with a specific focus on the produce and techniques of the Colombian Caribbean coast.
Sample hot pot and xiaomian in Chongqing
The neon lights of Chongqing
Courtesy of Chongqing Tourism
Chongqing is a city of more than 30 million people in southwestern China, its riverfront lit up at night by neon towers that reflect off the Yangtze below. It’s also the culinary capital of hot pot, a communal meal of bubbling broth spiked with chili oil and numbing Sichuan peppercorns where diners cook their own meat and vegetables. Chef Charlie Yang, who traces the city’s food story with content creator Matt Soren in USTOA’s Global Kitchen video, serves the dish at his own restaurant, Jin Yao Xuan Hot Pot.
Any visitor to Chongqing needs to save plenty of room for street food, too. At Ciqikou Ancient Town, one of the city’s best-preserved historic neighborhoods, the Chen Changyin stalls have been twisting and frying dough for 120 years along stone-paved lanes lined with traditional vendors.
A boat cruises the river that runs through Chongqing.
Courtesy of Chongqing Tourism
A nearby noodle shop focuses on Chongqing’s signature xiaomian, a spicy dish of chewy alkaline noodles tossed in a sauce of chili oil and Sichuan peppercorns. Then, after dark, street barbecue stalls appear with the smoke rising over open flames as they work through orders late into the night.
As for the local drinks scene, it encompasses ancient spirits and craft beer made for a new generation. Jiangji Distillery, based in Baisha Town in the Jiangjin District, has revitalized ancient techniques to produce jiangxiaobai, a lighter, smoother version of the potent baijiu aimed at younger drinkers. The distillery also produces meijian, a green plum liqueur made by infusing handpicked green plums with sorghum baijiu and aging the result in ceramic jars.
On the craft beer side, HopsCraft is a small nano-brewery whose founder returned from Japan with a passion for the format and put a local stamp on it, with beers like a tea lager and an IPA named after the Chongqing dialect word for umbrella. It’s a city that takes its drinking as seriously as its eating, and the two go best together.
These three cities, with their three very different cuisines, all share the same lesson: the best meal of the trip doesn’t necessarily require a reservation. Instead, you need a guide who knows the right restaurant or market stall to try.
Browse recipes from these four destinations and the others featured in the Global Kitchen cookbook, and watch the accompanying videos to see them come to life in the kitchen. Then, travel with a USTOA tour operator member who can draw on their expertise and connections to help you taste these dishes in the destination where they first came to life and learn more about the culture and history that inspired them.
