Have food, will travel 

It all started with dates on a date. A chance discovery of Iranian Medjool dates at a Beijing wet market sent me and my partner on an early-morning sprint back home to cook. We have an odd sort of travel bucket list – an expansive, playful, sometimes idiosyncratic collection of recipes and meal plans that we’d love to cook together.

A warming, delicious, romantic breakfast of date-and-cinnamon omelets was pretty high on the list, and we weren’t missing the chance to cross this one off.

Since then, our shared love for cooking has crossed over into our travel routines. Wherever we go, we offer to cook for someone or join a local cooking class.

We’ve made shakshuka in Seattle, an onion-fenugreek soup in Chengdu and, our ultimate travel party trick, a communal “samosas and mimosas” evening in Shanghai that combined a recipe for baked (not fried) samosas picked up from a friend in Singapore with the easiest of party drinks (equal amounts of orange juice and prosecco).

Over 15 people packed our musician friend’s kitchen, on the 15th floor of an apartment tower in the Jing’an district, folding, stuffing and baking. Her American bandmate even improvised a beetroot and feta cheese filling.

A mutual friend of ours must have scarfed down at least a hundred of them. “I’ve never had these,” he said. “Thanks for introducing this to me!”

Food roots our connection to the place we’re traveling to, much more than a tourist site would

Days later, we were invited to the home of one of the attendees. “Bring some spring onions and a jar of chilli bean paste,” was all he told us.

A few hours later, in his tiny shared kitchen, on an overcast October evening in Shanghai’s Songjiang district, we stirred, chopped and stir-fried a heavenly, home-cooked bowl of mapo tofu, a Sichuan classic and Shanghai favourite.

“This tastes like real Shanghai food,” our friend, who is half-Shanghainese, half Sichuanese, remarked. To us, it tasted like love.

In China, where we live, our cooking adventures have taken us to bustling wet markets (the Sanyuanli market in Beijing is a hidden gem, arguably the city’s most multi-cultural space, and a rare public microcosm of Beijing’s diversity), beautiful cooking schools (Shanghai’s unTour School lets you make your very own soup dumplings in a leafy French Concession courtyard) and a lot of supermarkets.

From Chengdu’s fiery Sichuanese to Shanghai’s delicate Jiangnan cuisine, Chinese food is a wellspring of romance, love, and connection. As in most cities – food in China is a window into its most storied traditions.

On our travels, food has shown us a side of cities we’d never normally see. It also gets us inordinately excited at spotting a rare jar of, say, Persian golpar (Angelica seeds) like we did in Portland, Oregon, or a beautifully packaged spice mix for the Guizhou specialty suān tāng yú (fish in sour soup) on a store shelf in Chengdu.

Food roots our connection to the place we’re traveling to, much more than a tourist site would. Most of all, though, cooking is the most romantic of shared experiences.

It’s a slow-burn dance, a complex choreography of reading silent signals and making quick adjustments. Every meal is a two-part journey, a frantic collaboration followed by a restorative, zen-like afterglow. We sip, slurp and bite in satisfied silence or amid hearty laughs, and it’s magical every time.