I like to travel. I get into it. It’s one thing to pass through a city, but I’d rather dig in and get a feel for it. I try to stay outside the tourist zones when possible, and get out into the neighborhoods. If you know a local, all the better. A tour guide who actually likes and knows a city and won’t douse you with the malarkey that many of those jive-ass tour operators usually do. Ever listen to the line of hooey they lay on the tourists in those double-decker buses? “And to your left you’ll see the apartment building where Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey wrote the first draft of their screenplay The Naked and the Dead in 1937.” Stuff like that. Anyway, a real local won’t do that to you. They take you to the best places to eat, that’s what they’ll do.

Food is always a fun part of travel for us. Part of the culture. Hitting those native restaurants is something you can’t do at home. Why anyone would choose shopping as a main travel activity is beyond me. Every city has just about the same stores, until you get out into the funky neighborhoods, of course. That I get. I’m not completely insensitive to the hunter-gathering instinct. But food, man. Local cuisine. That’s what I dig.

One good way to get to know a locale is via the stomach. You are what you eat. A city is what it serves up. Every city has its specialties from “Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon,” to quote Jack Torrence in The Shining. My little hometown of Muskegon, Michigan boasts a fabulous little lunch counter, serving up moist sweet-n-savory sandwiches unlike anything I’ve ever tasted before, anywhere. It’s an immaculate, mid-century joint called US 31 Bar-B-Q. Davenport, Iowa is known for its magnificent cinnamon rolls, Door County, Wisconsin for its fish boils and Las Cruces, New Mexico for its other-worldly chili.

These are things you can’t get quite the same anywhere else. I’m not talking about Cinnabon and BW3. I’m talking about places that define place, and flavors that inform a people. This brings me to chowing through New Orleans, where I write this now. It’s a fantastic food town, no doubt about that. There’s an embarrassment of cultural riches in the restaurant culture alone, and we’ve made a good dent in our short-list in the few days we’ve been here, starting off with a fried chicken lunch at Willie Mae’s Scotch House the day we landed, dinner at Brigtsen’s on Tuesday, and breakfast today at Elizabeth’s in the Bywater. They all nail some aspect of local eats from soul food to fancy Cajun to the unbeatable excess of a southern breakfast. And when you eat at places like that, you’re literally ingesting local culture. If we are what we eat, then I’m pretty New Orleans right now.

And that’s just dining out. The next level is being invited over for dinner by a local and getting their take on the food culture, vie good old home cookin’. We’re staying near a friend who is one hell of a cook, and he’s had us over for dinner twice (red beans and rice on Monday, the traditional NOLA dish for that day, and the best gumbo I’ve ever had in my life on Thursday, made with smoked turkey and andouille sausage, served over rice with a dollop of potato salad on top. Good gawd amighty.)

(As I wrote that phrase, James Brown’s raspy growl played out in my mind’s ear, and it reminded me of his food references—soul food, naturally—in a couple of songs. To wit: the end of “Make It Funky,” where he waxes rhapsodic about “Neck bones! Candied Yams! Toinips! Grits-n-gravy!” etc. Food makes the man, the man makes the culture, the culture makes the food and so on.)

On Sunday a couple had us over for dinner Uptown and on Wednesday my wife cooked spaghetti for 10 people. And at every meal there was king cake, the dessert of choice during carnival time. Mandatory, it seems, the king cake, not that I’m complaining….

A few more places I haven’t been yet, at the top of my “chowing through New Orleans” short list of eats: