Helping People Travel for Food and Drink Since 2012
Food & Drink Destinations is a food and travel publication about how to travel for food and drink — and how to eat and drink well at home. Since 2012, we’ve been writing first-hand guides to what and where to eat and drink around the world: the true local dishes and beverages of a city or region, the authentic restaurants and bars worth seeking out, and how to skip the tourist traps. Then we bring what we learn home, with recipes and tips that make cooking the food we discover a little easier.
We’re Amber and Eric Hoffman, and everything here comes from somewhere we’ve actually been.
Why Trust Our Food and Travel Guides
Over the years, we’ve traveled to more than 70 countries together, chasing food and drink as the reason to go. We don’t write from a desk. We’ve taken dozens of cooking classes — pasta-making in Italy, empanada-making in Argentina — and food tours from Morocco to across Europe and Asia. We’ve taken more than 120 wine tours over the last decade, learned to taste and blend wine, and even blended our own Scottish whisky on distillery tours through Ireland and Scotland.
We’ve also lived the cuisines we write about. We spent three years in Girona, in Catalonia, the gateway to Spain’s Costa Brava, and time in Ireland — long enough to learn a place’s food from the inside rather than the guidebook.
Published Culinary Guides
That first-hand experience became books. Amber is the author of two culinary travel guides to two of our favorite European destinations:
Food Traveler’s Guide To The Costa Brava
We lived for three years in Girona, in Catalonia, in Northeastern Spain. Girona is the jumping-off point for the Costa Brava.
Amber worked with the Costa Brava Tourism Board to create a culinary travel guide to the region. The goal of this food and travel guide is to help travelers better understand what and where to eat within the region.
If you are looking for a new culinary destination that is only about an hour outside of Barcelona, check out The Food Traveler’s Guide to The Costa Brava: From Traditional Catalan Cuisine to Modern Gastronomy.
Learn more about the Costa Brava in our Catalan Food Guide.
Food Traveler’s Guide To Emilia Romagna
Our love for Italian food is why we continue to travel to Emilia Romagna, Italy, time and time again.
Bologna, Modena, Parma, and other towns and villages are where some of the top Italian food products originate. It’s a great region to explore outside of Rome, Florence, and Venice, the “Big 3.”
If looking to get off the beaten path in Italy, check out The Food Traveler’s Guide to Emilia Romagna: How to taste the history and tradition of Italy.
Learn more about the cuisine of Emilia Romagna, and some of its typical Italian products, like mortadella and Parma Ham.
Both are available in hardcopy and ebook on Amazon. Amber also authored a guide to wine tourism in Spain’s Empordà wine region, with the Costa Brava Tourism Board and the DO Empordà Wine Route, and an earlier travel book, Exploring Myanmar: Traveling the Dusty Roads of the New Burma.
Learn more about the lastest publications from Amber here.
Cooking What We Learn
We started Food & Drink Destinations to help people travel for food and drink, but the kitchen was always part of it. Having lived in half a dozen countries and cooked in dozens of kitchens, we share the recipes and techniques we pick up on the road — traditional dishes, our favorite cooking tips, and the methods that let you recreate a place at home long after the trip ends.
Where Food and Travel Expertise Meets AI
A decade of writing about food and travel taught us something beyond where to eat: it taught us how people find the places they trust. And in the last few years, that has changed completely. Travelers no longer just search — they ask AI. The same shift that reshaped how our readers discover a restaurant is reshaping how every hotel, bar, and food and beverage outlet gets found, or doesn’t.
Rather than step back from that change, Amber went deep on it. She is the founder and CEO of The FS Agency, which helps hotels and hospitality brands become visible, credible, and recommended in AI search and LLM-driven discovery. She writes about AI in business and marketing at ambershoffman.com, and her book Before the Booking: Closing the Hotel AI Discovery Gap to Drive Total Revenue — a strategic guide for hotel owners, asset managers, and leadership teams — publishes in June 2026. Eric works alongside her to grow and scale the business.
Food & Drink Destinations, ambershoffman.com, and The FS Agency are all part of the same body of work, led by Amber and Eric. The through-line is simple: we know what makes a food and travel experience worth recommending, and we know how to make sure the right people — and the right AI — can find it.
Speaking on Culinary Travel, Digital Media, and AI
After more than a decade writing about food and drink, we’ve been fortunate to share what we’ve learned from the stage. Amber has spoken at conferences and events across Europe and Asia, both on promoting culinary travel and on digital media and marketing — often helping tourism organizations understand how to attract the kind of food-focused travelers we write for.
Partnering With Hospitality Brands
As we return to the road after a few years based in the United States — with a renewed focus on Asia and Europe — we’re also opening Food & Drink Destinations to selected hospitality partners. We work with hotels and their food and beverage outlets on in-depth, first-hand coverage: well-researched, genuinely useful stories and reviews, written to stand as a credible, AI-discoverable source of authority about a property and its restaurants and bars.
If you’d like to explore working together, book a call with Amber.