Blue Palate

image credit: Aubrey Arenas

Traveling on a tight budget can be tricky, especially in winter months when camping isn’t an easy option for those light on gear. After the costs of airfare or gas, hotel, and sightseeing add up, often there’s little leftover for fine wining and dining.

The gastronomic experience in a new city or town is as important to many as the museums, events, sports, shopping or hiking. Also, part of being on vacation is a holiday from the kitchen and monotony of everyday cooking. How do we eat well on the road and have money leftover to buy groceries when we get home?

Having taken many trips with limited funding, I’ve devised a few strategies for sticking to a budget and enjoying the culinary aspects of tourism.

• Book a hotel room with a small kitchenette. Cook most meals, especially breakfast and lunch, and splurge on a couple of nice meals. Grocery shopping in a new city can be as fun as dining out!
• Drink in your hotel room and save your money for meals. Alcohol can be the most expensive part of dining out. Buy a couple of your favorite bottles of wine or some cocktail makings and have a drink and appetizer (like some healthy nuts) on your balcony rather than the bar. At the restaurant, hold the alcohol or just order a glass instead of a whole bottle.
• Research restaurants before you go. Often, if we are unfamiliar with a city, we find ourselves hungry, desperate and eating in over-priced, underwhelming tourist-trap restaurants recommended by the concierge. Read up on a city or town’s top-rated restaurants, which aren’t always the most expensive, especially in local entertainment guides or weeklies. Websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor are useful too. (Read the customer reviews!)
• Be adventurous. The fun of traveling to a new place is trying new cuisine, the best food is often the local food. Eat where the locals eat. Venture from the downtown. Visit an international neighborhood or a college campus. You’ll likely find yourself paying less and having a more intriguing experience than if you ate at the fancy bistro across the street from your hotel.
• Splurge on one or two great meals. If you can’t have a vacation without visiting a five-star restaurant, pick one or two to visit for lunch (cheaper) or dinner, and eat frugally for the other meals.

Are you a seasoned budget traveler? Share your tips for vacation dining with fewer finds.

Pepe's in Santa Rosa, CA

Burritos are just about the perfect meal. They are cheap and filling and usually represent the major food groups. Put together with the right ingredients they are delicious. Only a handful of restaurants and food carts in Portland serve perfection in a tortilla, perhaps because we’re far from the border or because most the really good places have yet to become mainstream (I suspect the latter). Given the perfect burrito is hard to find in the state I now call home, any Blue Palate visit to California must include a stop at a taqueria. I always find time to lunch at Pepe’s off Stony Point Rd. in Santa Rosa, CA.

Pepe’s is a tiny Mexican food shack on the corner of a busy intersection, on the edge of Santa Rosa’s largest Hispanic neighborhood, easy to miss among the mega food stores, fast food joints, and gas stations. Some out-of-towners might mistake it for just another hole in the wall. On the contrary, Pepe’s boasts “The Best Burrito in Town.” I don’t doubt it.

If you happen to find yourself at this farming community hot spot, be sure to try their carne asada burrito. The carnitas are tangy and crispy, the tortillas made by hand. My husband Peter and I did lunch Blue Palate style and shared a burrito and two tacos, and loaded up on salsas and marinated jalapenos from their plentiful salsa bar. Perfect food.

So, burrito lovers: Where do you find perfection?

Photo credit: Joe Pemberton

Interstate 5 from Oregon to California, which I’ve driven a dozen or so times in my life, is the quickest way to travel up and down the west. It’s scenic in parts, but mostly it’s just straight and quick. And if you’re trying to make it to San Francisco in less than ten hours, be prepared to sacrifice any grand culinary aspirations. The freeway is dotted with the typical fast food and truck stop options, easy on the wallet but not always the palate.

I have found a little gem among the Taco Bells and Iron Skillets in the little town of Yreka neat the California and Oregon border. It’s definitely a convenient pit stop town, the first after climbing and descending the precarious Siskiyou pass. Nature’s Kitchen on Yreka’s main drag is a tiny oasis among a sea of fast food and gas station food marts. You can sit down for a quick, healthy sandwich and fresh juice or grab an iced espresso and a homemade date bar (big enough for two!). Best of all, this tiny natural cafe/store provides a dimly lit, peaceful sanctuary from the freeway, complete with calming smells of cumin and sandalwood, kind, smiling shopkeepers, and chant or flute music that will surely take the edge off.

Jump back on the freeway, hit 70 mph, and enjoy the view of Mt. Shasta, thankful you successfully dodged the drive thru window.