Recently I began to wonder about the pros and cons of this approach to seeing the world. So I called up Mervis at his home in Glasgow to get his take.
How do you travel like a local? What does that mean to you?
I moved to Copenhagen just 24 hours into a spontaneous trip there, and I’ve lived abroad for the last 15 years. To this day, whenever I’m traveling somewhere, I’m ready to pretend for a moment that I live there. So I try on a routine: I get coffee, get drinks, strike up conversations with locals, walk the streets, look up at the architecture. If I like a restaurant, I go back as many times as I want. I treat the place with the same respect I would my hometown.
In some ways it sounds like you’re living like a local. But the way you talk about walking around a city sounds to me like a tourist. If somebody stops on a street in New York to look up at a skyscraper, I assume they just got off a bus.
It’s the way you feel when you’ve just moved to a city. You’re like, “This is my new neighborhood! I’m going to go to that cafe every week!” It’s that outsized energy you have at the beginning.
And all that helps you to get to know a city?
Well, I have to confess to my nerdiness. I have a background in some seriously niche history, so research always gets me excited. At the bare minimum, I’m downloading the entire Wikipedia page on a city and its food culture. Give me the crash course.
But you can’t create the experience of visiting a city purely in your mind. Until you actually go to a city, you won’t know what your favorite food will be or your favorite thing to do. And in my opinion, you don’t want to know. It ruins the charm. You want to avoid researching too much so you can feel a bit outside of your comfort zone to channel the child-like wonder of traveling.
There is a sense that eating like a local requires you go beyond your comfort zone. Is that something you seek out?
I also don’t want to go all the way in the other direction. I’m worried we’ve become so caught up over the most authentic experience. I don’t want to get to the point where it’s a competition to only go to places that have never had a website, an Instagram account, or an Eater write-up. I personally find that kind of competition to be soul-sucking.
So you don’t mind eating with fellow tourists?
On some level, I do find it immersion-breaking when a place is just full of tourists. I’m imagining Ramiro in Lisbon, arguably the best restaurant in the city, holds up in terms of quality, but mostly serves tourists. I also think of St. John in London, which still serves a lot of Londoners too. I usually just ignore the obvious tourists.
Part of it is the type of tourist these places attract. People know what to order at Ramiro before they go. Everyone is like, “You have to get x, y, and z.” To be fair, those travelers are interested in learning about food that’s unique to a place. Versus another kind of tourist, like the one on a stag do [bachelor party], who needs to find places with the cheapest food and drinks where they can act like an idiot. I don’t want to turn my nose up at someone who appreciates some aspects of a city, but doesn’t really care about the food. Just don’t treat a culture implicitly like it’s less valuable than your own.
