Food | Drink | Destinations: Travel For Food | Cook At Home

Welcome To Food And Drink Destinations

Our Mission

Food And Drink Destinations is the ultimate guide on how to travel for food and drink. We provide tips on what and where to eat and drink worldwide. Then, we bring what we learn home with tips on how to eat and drink well at home and make cooking easier.

Our mission is met when our readers learn:

1. What to eat and drink when traveling to a new destination. What are the true local dishes and beverages for that city or region?
2. Where to eat and drink when traveling. How do you find the local, authentic restaurants and bars and how to avoid the tourist traps.
3. How to cook authentic and tasty recipes at home, including traditional recipes and our favorite cooking tips and products.

Lisa Vespoli

Contributor and Owner

Lisa has lived and traveled internationally throughout her life and has a passion for finding local food and drink experiences around the world and sharing her favorite experiences with fellow aficionados. She has also created a network of like-minded people globally to help contribute to sharing great finds with others.

Travel Experience – Why Trust Our Travel Tips?

As the current owner and in collaboration with the original founders Amber and Eric Hoffman who have traveled to over 70 countries, Lisa incorporates her own experiences and adventures into providing current, relatable content as well as inviting fellow world travelers and natives to contribute to an expanded network of food and drink focused travel experts.

Lisa’s Tribute to Founders Eric and Amber’s Food And Cooking Experience

Although we started writing about food and travel over a decade ago, our love and passion for food and cooking go back even further. Over the last ten years, though, we’ve managed to:

• Take dozens of cooking classes, including about a half dozen pasta-making courses in Italy alone. We’ve learned to make focaccia, Philipino food, and even kimchi in a Korean food class.
• We’ve taken dozens of food tours, from half-day and full-day food tours to a culinary tour in Morocco.
• Amber’s written two culinary travel guides to some of our favorite European destinations.
• We’ve met some of the top chefs in the world, including Joan Roca from El Celler de Can Roca and Joan Mari Arzak from Arzak in San Sebastian.
• We’ve made it a point of learning as much as we can about food, cooking, and the history of local cuisine. Some of Amber’s favorite books include cookbooks like Claudia Roden’s The Food Of Spain, and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
• To learn about food and culture, we recommend Rice, Noodle, Fish and Grape, Olive, Pig both from Matt Goulding along with Catalan Cuisine from Colman Andrews. It’s important for us to learn about the history, tradition, and culture of the destinations we travel to and write about.
• To learn about contemporary cooking and molecular gastronomy, check out Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, about cooking at El Bulli in Catalonia.

Published Culinary Guides

Amber published her first travel book about Myanmar called Exploring Myanmar: Traveling the Dusty Roads of the New Burma.

With our years of experience traveling through Europe, Amber published two culinary guides to two of our favorite destinations.

Both guides are available in hard copy and ebook formats on Amazon now. 

Experience With Drinks: Wine, Craft Beer, and Whiskey

• We often are asked if we would ever open our own winery. We’ve taken over 120 wine tours over the last decade, so we know how to make wine, but we will leave it up to the experts. Our wine tourism experience includes numerous classes and courses on how to taste wine.
• While traveling, we’ve also taken dozens of drink tours, including craft breweries, gin distilleries, and whiskey distilleries, particularly in Ireland and Scotland.
• We’ve learned how to blend wine and blend our own Scottish whisky.
• Some of Amber’s favorite books about drinks include The Widow Clicquot, The Judgment of Paris, The Billionaire’s Vinegar, and Whiskey Women. We make it a point of learning about drink history and how different beverages are produced.
• Amber also wrote a book on wine tourism in the Emporda wine region in conjunction with the Costa Brava Tourism Board and the DO Emporda Wine Route.

Cooking At Home

Although we started this blog to help people travel for food and drink, we quickly learned that we wanted to share our cooking tips as well. This became particularly important when travel slowed and we all started spending more time at home, cooking and baking.

Over the years, we’ve lived in a half dozen countries with different local cuisine and have cooked in dozens of different kitchens. We know the kitchen products we love to use and the ones we miss when traveling. We wanted to share our experience with our food-loving readers and home chefs.

How We Review And Rate Products ⭐️

We only recommend brands we trust. We try to recommend kitchen products we’ve owned or used personally and we offer alternatives. We choose these alternative products based on recommendations from other food bloggers and chefs, sommeliers, and winemakers.

We conduct thorough research on the company, how the products are made, and whether they are a good value for home chefs. This allows us to offer competitive analysis, provide pros and cons of various products, and ensure you are purchasing quality products for your home.

• Some of the kitchen brands we love the most include 360 Cookware, UnoCasa, Calphalon, Ninja, and Instant Pot.
• For wine and drink products, we love Wine Enthusiast, VinGarde, and Danby.
• We often recommend purchasing products from Amazon because of the variety of kitchen and homeware brands they carry.
• Sometimes, we recommend buying a product directly from the manufacturer when we know it’s a brand we trust.

Learn more here.

Speaking Engagements on Culinary Travel

After over seven years of writing about food and drink, we’ve developed a bit of an expertise. Our goal is always to help culinary travelers seek new and unique gastronomy experiences. This includes helping tourism organizations learn how to attract culinary travelers. 

Over the years, Amber has spoken at numerous conferences and events across Europe and Asia. In addition to speaking about digital media, her focus has been on promoting culinary travel.