Performative Gastronomic Tourism

We do not travel to enrich ourselves, but to show our followers that we

Once upon a time, people went around to “tourist”, exploring landmarks, museums, and getting a flavour of the local culture through its food, organically tasted through serendipitous encounters.

Then came the guide - a book or physical entity in the form of a human, complete with recommendations, shortcuts to places, and tips, aimed at improving the tourist’s experience in “living the place”. After 2020, an acceleration took place: there is no time to “waste time exploring”: all the exploring is outsourced to people who will “create content” with those findings, chewing and spitting it out in a very short and condensed format that is suitable to the Blitz-tourism timing, which is often just a weekend, or a day.

This Blitztourism requires a strict schedule and demands its acolytes to focus solely on the essential things. Important things are those that are repeated infinitely, like in a house of mirrors, by every small screen available.

This has led to two phenomena.

The first one is the absurdity of queuing for “experiences”: people queuing to see the Gioconda at the Louvre, even if they think Leonardo is an actor, or have never even had a minimal interest in Italian Renaissance art, and skipping the rest of the museum altogether. People queuing for that only single eatery that is “known”, blissfully ignoring that just around the corner, there is something similar, equally relevant, with no queue. This is true for music, art, food, and anything else: while Miley Cyrus had queues, other musicians did not, and the difference lies in hype, not in the intrinsic artistic quality or (more importantly) individual taste.

The second one is the proliferation of “same but different”: I often write about how absurd I think it is for tourists to queue in front of the pancake and avocado toast places in Lisbon, given that there are dozens of the same brand around town. Why do they waste some of their precious trip time waiting in line for this? The proliferation is visible in everything: in Lisbon today, “sushi and sashimi” and “informal Japanese dining” are all the rage, to the extent that even French sandwich shops are jumping onto the bandwagon in search of some extra business. In music, the same: I cannot tell the difference between Miley Cyrus and Sabrina Carpenter: blonde, former Disney, young, and skimpily dressed singers who sing melodic, teen-friendly songs.

Originality, in 2025, is a bug - and an undesired one.

Mass-market productions, such as SHEIN, demand that their customers be a bland, blended group of non-individuals, rather than a flow of gradients of the same flavours. Zara, H&M and other brands have done it already: you can travel around the Global North and find yourself “at home” in every city centre, as the shops and the items in said shops are the same from Poland to Portugal, from Oslo to Athens, and so on.

Similarly, in restaurants, we see the same things popping up everywhere. Big chains and large investment groups are pushing for this kind of standardisation.

But when a Pastel de Nata shop opens up in London or Manchester, and a San Gines chocolate café opens up in Lisbon, what happens? Will we still travel around to taste the same things that have just opened back home?

As we have lost the love for discovery, there are, also, very few things to discover left as everything is the same (in every town there is now a natural wine bar with small plates to share based on fermented vegetables, pastrami, and oysters and in every city there is a sourdough bakery with cinnamon rolls and croissants, and in every town there is just the same over and over from Neapolitan pizza to Dutch french fries).

Even if we physically move, we are under the growing impression of being still: at least, this is what I felt this spring in Helsinki, Trier, Rome, and Lisbon. Everywhere, the same shops, the same, even if slightly tailored, concepts of restaurants and eateries.

We may move.

Take trains, planes, and enter a different linguistic space. However, in practical terms, we are never too far from a Zara, from a French natural wine bar, from a sourdough bakery, from a Neapolitan pizza.

What I notice is that the number of topoi is increasing: nowadays, pastel de nata is to be found anywhere in the Global North. Ditto for churros: you don’t have to travel to San Ginés in Madrid or to Belém in Lisbon to satisfy your cravings of these specific items.

Performative Gastronomic Tourism

In this context, where everything is everywhere, all at once, all the time, and in an infinite loop of the same, even “creating content” is becoming difficult. Creating content is easy, but being different in the way one makes it, so that one can manage to stand out from the crowd of endlessly similar performances, is increasingly arduous.

In this context, the discovery is not the purpose for travelling (anymore).

The sole purpose becomes the validation of a pre-acquired concept.

We travel to eat at a place not because we think we will enjoy it, nor because we have discovered that place specifically, among many others, through someone with similar tastes or through serendipitous encounters.

We travel to eat specific things at specific restaurants because the tiny screens told us so. It does not matter to us that the thing we are asked to eat is also an endless copy of something else. It does not matter if we do not like the thing we will be eating. All that matters is that we will be able to narrate, story-tell, and create content about our experiences. An experience that will undoubtedly be the same as everyone else posting the duplicate content on the same media, because most of us are not artists, strictu sensu, and cannot create art. At most, we can replicate the pattern of a successful #adv that someone before us created, perhaps with slightly better skills.

Our eating and our tourism are highly performative.

We do not do them for ourselves - we would not post on social media, tag, hashtag and secretly hope our post will be reposted by the venue, or, glory divine, by someone relevant like a Chef, so that our experience gets validated through that screen, not much through our mouths.

I have mostly stopped tagging or revealing information about the places I go.

Primarily because I don’t care - I’m not an influencer, nor do I need to create content for social media. I go out and eat - perhaps more than in the past months, and yet I do not share. I say something in my diary - which I keep paywalled not because I intend to make money out of it, but just because there is no other way on Substack to reserve specific publications just for certain public: I mostly give away free passes to all those people I want to read my “private” posts.

Because, frankly, I do not care where most of the people eat or where most of the people go. I know my food tastes are very much akin to those of Lakshmi Aguirre so if I need a recommendation, I can ping her - or Riccardo Astolfi, or Cris Silva or the team of Commestibile or any other person I know aligns in terms of taste, interests and philosophies with me.

For instance, two years ago, I had to be in Málaga for a couple of days for work. So, I pulled my trusted sources, one of whom is Edu Perez, the Chef of TOHQA, and asked where they thought I should go. They knew me, I knew them, and through their suggestions, I got a charming and pleasant series of dinners, culminating with the discovery of Chef Dani Carnero at Kaleja and La Cosmo.

I would never, however, blank-recommend the restaurants I got in my tips lists to you who are reading, unless I do know you and also in that case I may suggest something else, based on who you are, what is the purpose of your trip, your likes and dislikes, and what I think is fit for this purpose.

Mine is not performative tourism, and I do not have to be at any place I do not want to be. Even in the articles I write, I can choose what to feature without compromise.

And this is one of the reasons why I never say where I took the pictures decorating my articles (sorry!)