The impact of the pneumonia-like disease caused by the virus, called Covid-19, is already being felt across the Asian continent, where leisure and business travel contributed $884 billion to gross domestic product in 2017, the most recent year for which data has been compiled by the World Travel and Tourism Council. (Projections for 2018 are about $1 trillion.) For China alone, inbound tourism brought in $127.3 billion in 2019, according to the country’s tourism bureau.

Economic fallout from China’s coronavirus mounts across the globe

But as diagnoses tick upward again, travel agents, operators, and hoteliers are bracing for at least months, if not a full year, of economic disruption from the outbreak, with long-term effects that may ripple well into 2021.

“The numbers of trip cancellations-not just to China but to the entire continent of Asia-is growing every day,” says Jack Ezon, founder and managing partner of luxury travel agency Embark Beyond. “People are put off. Sadly, a lot of them are just saying, ‘I don’t know if I want to go anywhere right now.’ Or, in many cases, ‘I’ll just go next year.’ ”

So far, almost 75% of his travelers have canceled their February and March departures to Southeast Asian countries, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still considers to have a lower, level one risk for coronavirus. “They’re worried about being anywhere close to the outbreak,” he says, “or of getting stuck with canceled flights if other hubs become infected.” A full 100% of the honeymoons his agency had booked to the region have been canceled and rebooked for alternate destinations including the Maldives, Southern Africa, and Australia.

Hilton Chief Executive Officer Chris Nassetta told investors on Feb. 11 that he expects the impact of the new coronavirus to last anywhere from six to 12 months: “Three to six months of escalation and impact from the outbreak, and another three to six on recovery,” he said. He estimated the cost to his company could be from $25 million to $50 million.

Why so long, if the medical community is beginning to send optimistic messages about the number of new cases?

When it comes to leisure travel, the biggest question usually revolves around location, location, location. Once that’s been decided, weather dictates all. “North Asia you can do year-round, but Southeast Asia is much more challenging,” says Catherine Heald, co-founder and CEO of the Asia-focused travel specialist Remote Lands. “Thanks to monsoons and very hot temperatures in most of that region,” which last roughly March through September, “people aren’t looking seriously at rebooking until the fall,” she says.

For families, school schedules can complicate plans. “We had one family looking at traveling over spring break, and they won’t have that same window of time until next year’s spring break,” she says. “They’re rebooking for 2021.” The same logic applies for those who specifically wanted to see cherry blossoms in Japan or flowers blooming alongside treks in Nepal-common reasons to plan a spring trip.

Heald’s clients are among the most likely to help the industry rebound. So far her company has seen fewer cancellations than have her competitors because of the way she targets leisure and high-spending travelers. An average trip with Remote Lands costs $1,500 per day for two people, which makes her a purveyor of bucket-list vacations-trips that people are desperately hoping to realize.

“People spend a lot of time and money planning these trips,” she says. “They want to make it happen.” Her workaround so far has been to simply reroute airfares through unaffected hubs, replacing routes through Hong Kong or Shanghai with connections in Tokyo, Seoul, or Dubai. The cost, she says, can range depending on availability of fares and type of tickets booked. “On a scale from 1 to 10, the disruption to our business has been about a 2 or 3,” Heald says, explaining that travelers’ willingness to postpone, rather than cancel, keeps her balance sheets mostly intact.

Business in China was already low this year because of negative press about trade wars. Heald says only 3 out of 400 trips she booked last year were China-only. Ezon agrees: “China was a little soft this year for leisure anyway, and Hong Kong was a mess from July” and the ongoing protests there.

The broader Southeast Asia region had been benefiting from the overflow, but that momentum is on hold. “People are canceling Sri Lanka and India just because it’s part of Asia,” Ezon says. “There haven’t even really been cases there, but so much is unknown that people are just staying away.” (Sri Lanka has reported one case of someone infected with the new coronavirus and India has reported three so far, according to Bloomberg’s coronavirus tracker.)

Hotels understand travelers’ fears, nonsensical as they may seem. Many have extended gracious policies allowing people to change their plans throughout the Asia-Pacific region at no cost, as long as they rebook before the 2020 festive season. Like Heald and her fellow travel specialists, many hotels are hoping to best retain their 2020 revenues and mitigate outright cancellations.

That’s less of an option for operators such as Guy Rubin, founder of Imperial Tours, whose entire business is based on luxury trips to the Chinese mainland. “Obviously, we have had cancellations and postponements for January, February, and March,” he says. But even travelers with itineraries for October have been inquiring about cancellations.

Others are in a holding pattern, waiting to see if the current strategy of quarantining people to contain the virus works. “If the containment strategy works, then I imagine people will be traveling in China again by summer,” Rubin says. “If it does not work, then I imagine it will take a year for people to regain trust in China.”

Severe acute respiratory system (SARS) is one example the industry is studying for guidance. It took WHO roughly four months from the moment it announced a global alert about SARS until it said the disease was contained, and then an additional five months for the organization to wrap up its efforts to tally new cases. According to aviation analysts at AirInsight, the SARS outbreak cost airlines $10 billion, and that was at a time when global business was less developed.

If it similarly takes nine months for the Covid-19 outbreak to pivot into “recovery” status, which is consistent with the industry outlooks cited here, aviation will take a bigger hit. And it will take longer still for hotels and destinations to fully return to tourism levels before the disease’s spread.

“Think about Fukushima,” Heald says, referring to the 2011 nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. “People didn’t regain trust or interest in travel to Japan for years.” The flip side is that when they did, she says, there was such pent-up demand that it led to a boom in tourism: Overseas arrivals rose from 13.4 million in 2014 to 31.2 million in 2018. After many years of reassuring travelers they didn’t need to worry about radiation exposure, Japan suddenly became the fastest-growing destination in the world.

Ezon agrees this tide will ebb and flow. “If SARS was bad, this will be worse,” he says. “But remember Ebola? It’s still in Africa, and safari bookings are stable. Remember chikungunya? Once the news cycle moves on,” he says, “people will forget. Just like everything else, it’ll bounce back.”

The Czech capital this week approved a plan that calls for legislative changes allowing local authorities to restrict short leases, improve tax collection and force the platforms to share more details about its users, including the number of guests during a stay. The city is cooperating with the national government and will try to push the changes through parliament this year.

“We just have to be able to counter the adverse effects of the boom of short-time rentals through digital platforms for citizens whether it is the touristification of neighborhoods, rising rents or lack of housing,” said Hana Kordova Marvanova, who prepared the proposal. “Unfortunately, the current legislation does not give us means to address the issue.”

Prague has debated for years whether to apply stricter rules to rein in Airbnb. The issue has intensified lately due to ballooning Airbnb rentals in Prague and growing complaints from citizens about noise, damage to historical buildings and rising rents. The city is also battling a housing crisis as apartments are taken off the market by owners jumping into short-term rental craze, mirroring a growing trend across Europe.

Airbnb disputed the claim that the system overloads the housing market and pushes out locals. Company spokeswoman Kirstin Macleod said a 2018 study by the Czech Center for Economic and Market Analysis concluded that Airbnb accomodation was equivalent to just 1.8% of the city’s total housing stock.

Nevertheless, the company takes “local concerns seriously,” she said in an emailed response to questions from Bloomberg, and is willing to work with all parties in Prague and across the globe to make home sharing viable and safe.

“Recently, we have approached the City of Prague on several occasions,” Macleod said, “and offered to work together on a similar partnership and we are hopeful that we can find a common solution in future.”

Another study in the same year by the Planning and Development Institute of Prague, however, concluded that as many as a fifth of all apartments in the capital’s Old Town district, and 10% in the surrounding areas are listed on the site. Some 80% of listings are entire apartments, according to the study.

So far, Prague has been unsuccessful in regulating the holiday rental site and similar efforts have previously failed to gain the support of lawmakers. Kordova Marvanova also said that previous talks with Airbnb didn’t bring any feasible results for the city.

It has now joined forces with the Ministry of Local Development to finalize the proposals before going to parliament. City officials are also holding talks with the Czech Chamber of Commerce and counterparts in Cesky Krumlov, a southern Bohemian town also heavily hit by over-tourism.

“There is an overwhelming agreement that we need the platforms to share information with us,” Kordova Marvanova said.

If the amendments are passed, Airbnb-type platforms will have to provide municipalities with detailed information regarding units being used in the business, sharing basic host data and the number of guests. According to Kordova Marvanova, the capital led unsuccessful negotiations with Airbnb about providing the data.

Other proposals still have to be further discussed with the ministry. The city also proposes giving local authorities rights to ban renting whole flats as opposed to single rooms, limit the number of rented days or subject the apartments for rent to stricter fire safety rules.

Prague’s council approved a move to join 10 European cities – Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Bordeaux, Brussels, Krakow, Munich, Paris, Valencia and Vienna — that signed a letter calling on the European Commission to update its laws as part of a battle to control the sites.

But she’s made the country so attractive to readers – and to watchers of the Starz television program, which resumes with Season 5 on Sunday – that the Scottish government’s tourism agency gave her an honorary Thistle Award for generating a flood of visitors to the fens, glens, jagged mountains and soft jade landscapes she so alluringly describes. According to numbers from VisitScotland, Outlander has increased tourism by an average of 67 percent at the sites mentioned in the books or used in filming.

Gabaldon, who is from Phoenix, wrote the first book and part of the second before traveling to Scotland. As a research professor pre-internet, she read exhaustively to craft indelible images of Scottish places for the “practice novel” she kept secret from her husband. When the unfinished draft sold in a three-book deal for a “staggering amount of money at the time,” Gabaldon let her professorship lapse and headed to Scotland. Despite having no Scottish heritage, she says, “I remember seeing the green land rising and thinking, ‘This feels like home.’ ” She and her husband parked at Carter Bar, where she posed for a photo in front of the England-Scotland border stone. This stone appears in Book 3, “Voyager,” where the character Jamie says of it, “Looks like the sort of stone to last a while,” according to fan Karen Henry, who blogs at Outlandish Observations.

If you long to visit after being exposed to the sweeping vistas and compelling history in the books and the show – for which Gabaldon, 68, is consultant and wrote several episodes – here are some spots to include on the itinerary.

Inverness: “It’s called the heart of the Highlands,” says Gabaldon of the city she names as her first recommendation, “and has reverberations through the third book and on into the rest of the series. It’s where the entire clan system came to a screeching halt.” In the show, however, Inverness is played by another city, Falkland.

Culloden Battlefield, five miles from Inverness: Here, the Jacobite rebellion ended in one hour of brutal bloodshed in 1746. “The Scots really didn’t have a chance,” says Judy Lowstuter, owner of Celtic Journeys travel company. After the loss to the English, Scots “were not permitted to speak Gaelic, and in the Highlands that’s all they spoke. They wouldn’t let them wear kilts or play bagpipes; the whole culture was extinguished.”

A battlefield is a somber place to visit, but Hugh Allison, former property manager at Culloden who now owns Inverness Tours, says he’s found a way to help U.S. visitors relate to the site. “You could make the argument that this is the battle that formed the United States of America,” he says. Its repercussions emptied English and French treasuries, which meant England’s King George III called for more taxes in the American colonies, “and we know where that went.”

At Culloden, various clans have memorial stones on the battlefield. Although the character Jamie Fraser is fictional, his clan is not. And yes, that clan has a stone on the battlefield as well.

Like everyone I spoke with, Allison paid homage to the Outlander Effect. “Twice as many people were asking where the Fraser stone is. You have to think, either it’s a very fertile clan and there are twice as many Frasers as there were last year, or something else has happened. Diana (Gabaldon) was that something else.”

The Covenanter Hotel, Falkland, Fife: This serves as Mrs. Baird’s B&B in the TV show, where Claire and Frank stay near Craigh na Dun. Gabaldon told me via email about a “busload of Spanish tourists from Barcelona who pulled up outside the hotel and streamed inside to check in, only to be told by the proprietress who had been watching out her upstairs window that I was outside. … They fell upon me in a frenzy of affection, hugging and kissing me and carrying on about Jamie and Claire.” Graeme Watson, who now co-owns the hotel with Ross Moonlight, says the hotel serves food all day so you have a reason to stop even if you can’t stay overnight in the room decked out as Claire’s. “It’s got an Outlander theme, so there are tartans as the bedspreads, and a medicine bag in the room as a nod to Claire,” he says. Steps from the front door, you’ll want to Instagram yourself at the fountain where Jamie stood to look up at Claire in the window – a mystery for fans who can’t figure out how he came to be there.

Falkland Palace, Falkland, Fife: This beautiful hunting palace has marvelous gardens and the oldest tennis court in Scotland, where Mary, Queen of Scots, and her father played. Besides serving as an apothecary in the show’s “Hail Mary” episode, the palace appears in the inaugural episode if you know where to look for it, according to Allison. Claire peers in the window of the ironmonger (a term used until the 1970s in Scotland to mean “hardware store”) at a blue vase. “Look over her shoulder and you’ll see the gatehouse of Falkland Palace,” Allison says.

Doune Castle, Doune, Perthshire: This medieval stronghold that plays Castle Leoch on TV conveys visible poignancy: Claire and Frank visit it in ruins in the show’s “modern day” 1940s, and Claire returns when it is in its heyday. Visits to the castle have increased 227 percent since the Starz series debuted in 2014, according to a report called “The Outlander Effect & Tourism,” commissioned by VisitScotland last year, the highest rise for the filming sites in the study.

Craigh na Dun: The circle of vertical stones, so necessary for time travel? It doesn’t exist. “The standing stones that appeared in the television series are fake and are in the studio in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow. They’re made of something like Styrofoam,” reports Lowstuter. But dinna fash, Sassenach, you can still visit the hilltop where the menhirs were temporarily placed, at Kinloch Rannoch Moor in Perthshire, about 90 minutes northeast of Edinburgh. It’s hard to find, but there is a parking lot at Pitlochry, Perthshire. It’s on private land, a working farm, so be a careful visitor. Gabaldon says Craigh na Dun, a phrase she invented, means “the stone of the hill” in Gaelic. “I was reading a lot of books on folklore and standing stone circles,” she says, “and all of them ended the same way – ‘But nobody actually knows the purpose of the stones’ – and I thought, well, I can think of something.”

Finnich Glen, near Glasgow: Attempt this visit only if you are hardy and fit. In the show, this glen serves as the Liar’s Spring, where Dougal confronts Claire about witchcraft, “the sexiest scene in the whole series,” Lowstuter says. “It’s a beautiful waterscape, like a fairy glen in this secret, wild Celtic landscape.” Currently, it’s very difficult to find and requires a sketchy maneuver to park your car where there’s no official lot and, most treacherously, a climb down mossy, slippery stone steps, some of which no longer fit into their grooves. “How they got a film crew down there, I don’t know,” Lowstuter says. But thanks to the Outlander Effect, there are plans to put in a parking lot, build a visitor center and repair the stairs.

Some sites are off the tourist path for other reasons. The Reverend Wakefield’s home, where characters settle into the library to conduct research, is a private house not open to visitors, according to Jenni Steele, the film and creative industries manager at VisitScotland. “There are a lot of locations in the series that I cannot promote,” she said. “They might be on private land, or a historic structure delicate in its fabric that can’t cope with too many visitors.”

Preston Mill, East Linton, near Edinburgh: This is another site that has benefited from needed repairs. The old mill’s wheel, under which Jamie hid from English soldiers, was jammed, but Steele said Outlander fans responded enthusiastically to a funding appeal for restoration work, and the target was reached quickly.

Tibbermore Parish Church, Perth: One of the most harrowing scenes is when Claire undergoes a witchcraft trial with Geillis (“best.vaccination.ever”). “This is no longer a practicing church,” says Steele, adding that fans contributed to allow the 1632 facility to work on preservation.

Bakehouse Close, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh: Although you may not enter, you can climb the outdoor stone staircase to the print shop where Jamie and Claire were reunited. Steele says the shop is quite close to a historic printers shop at Tweeddale Court called Oliver & Boyd. “You can still see the name above one of the doors,” she says.

Astonishingly, all the locations for “Outlander,” excepting South Africa, were filmed in Scotland. The VisitScotland website features 42 shooting sites up through Season 4, and after Season 5 ends, its locations will be added, too.

The Scots praise Gabaldon not just for the tourists she’s brought but for her generosity of spirit and sense of kinship with the country. There are tales of book signings that didn’t end until 2:30 a.m., benefits for hospice associations, sandwich shops that gave her food on the house because she did so much to raise the local economy.

“People may go to Scotland thinking of Jamie and Claire, but when they come home, it’s Scotland in their minds, because of the way Diana has represented Scotland in the books,” Lowstuter says. “She kept very true to the history and magic of Scotland, embellished by her ability to bring it to life on the page.”

– – –

IF YOU GO:

WHERE TO STAY

– The Covenanter Hotel

The Square, High Street, Falkland

011-44-1337-857163

covenanterfalkland.com

Closed until Feb. 26 for renovations. Double room about $110 per night; Outlander room about $252 per night.

WHAT TO DO

– Culloden Battlefield

East of Inverness, off the A9/B9006

011-44-1463-796090

nts.org.uk/visit/places/culloden

Battlefield open all year, daily. Visitor center hours vary and change monthly; open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. until Feb. 29; hours expand in spring. Guided battlefield tour included with admission. Adults about $14, children/seniors about $12.

– Falkland Palace

East Port, Falkland

011-44-1337-857397

nts.org.uk/visit/places/falkland-palace

Closed Nov. 1 to Feb. 29; opens March 1. Hours vary; Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Palace and garden admission about $17 adults; children/seniors about $12. Garden-only admission about $8 adults, children/seniors about $6.

– Doune Castle

Castle Hill, Doune

011-44-1786-841742

historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/doune-castle

Open daily 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., last entry 3:30 p.m. Oct. 1 to March 1; hours expand starting April 1. Admission about $12 adults, about $9 seniors over 60, about $7 ages 5 to 15.

– Kinloch Rannoch Moor

MVVR+5J Lassintullich, Pitlochry

visitscotland.com/info/towns-villages/great-moor-of-rannoch-p246531

Free.

– Finnich Glen

2HMJ+J7 Craighat, Glasgow

011-44-7955-037368

Free.

– Preston Mill

Preston Road, East Linton

011-44-1620-860246

nts.org.uk/visit/places/preston-mill

Closed through April 1. Starting April 2, open Thursday to Monday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Adult admission about $8, children/seniors about $6.

– Tibbermore Parish Church

Tibbermore, Perth

011-44-0131-5635135

srct.org.uk/index.php/our-churches/tibbermore-church

Contact the keyholder in advance to arrange entry; visit the website for details. Free, but donations welcomed.

– Bakehouse Close

One of 80 closes (alleyways) off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. Located across the street from the Canongate Kirk, 153 Canongate.

INFORMATION

– visitscotland.com/outlander

Another server presented my friend and me with a cheese plate, pointing out bleu cheese, goat cheese with Moroccan spices, smoked Gouda, Gruyere. Beef bourguignon followed as a second course, and a whipped cream-topped, roasted pear and chocolate-almond crepe wrapped up the proceeding. It all had the air of tradition that Julia Child would have appreciated. Except for one thing.

There was no meat or dairy products in any of the dishes. The cheese is made from cashews. The steak tartare is made from a yellow split-pea creation colored with beet juice and jazzed up with cornichon slices, shallots, capers, mustard. The foie gras (perhaps better dubbed faux gras) is a tahini and cashew formulation. That beef? The same split-pea invention cooked with the classic bourguignon medley of thyme, bay leaves and pinot noir. The crepe is topped with coconut cream.

I ate it with the same disorienting fascination one experiences when watching a convincing celebrity impersonator.

The kitchen at this West Village bistro is run by chef-owner Yvette Caron, who was a surgical oncologist in France when she started researching and discovering the health effects of plant-based diets on people suffering from anything from arthritis to cancer. She found relief from arthritis herself when she radically changed her diet, her son Christophe, who co-owns the place with his parents, told me. She became disenchanted with the medical industry and wanted to help people in a different way, he explained. Christophe, a model, had moved to New York in 2010 and, craving an authentic taste of home, opened a creperie. He later recruited his mother to join, and the concept turned into a full-blown French bistro with an entirely plant-based menu.

Vegan food has made its way into the zeitgeist at an exponentially fast pace in the past few years as health and environmental concerns become part of everyday conversation.

In 2019, the Agriculture Department released data showing a 47% decline in milk consumption since 1970, a figure that led to Dean Foods, the country’s biggest milk producer, filing for bankruptcy in November. This comes on the tail (errr . . . stem?) of Impossible Burger and Beyond Meats, the two biggest players in the plant-based patty game, disrupting the fast-food industry. According to Barclays, the plant-based meat substitute category is expected to be worth $140 billion in the next decade.

Vegan cooking is making its mark on Manhattan, a place that’s historically been identified with foods that are the opposite. (See: pastrami, pizza, hot dogs, and bagels with lox and a schmear.) And in typical New York style, it’s being done with ferocious creativity.

In 2005, before any of this was au courant, Ronen Seri was simply looking for a restaurant that could support his vegan diet. The Israeli expat was studying acting in New York, and his restaurant quest continually came up empty. So he opened his own, Blossom, first in Chelsea in 2005 and then on the Upper West Side in 2007. In a comic twist, the latter is located a few storefronts up from a restaurant called the Viand, a nod to the French term for meat.

Ronen has a unique perspective, having watched his long-standing diet become more mainstream over time. “Years ago when we opened, you’d say ‘vegan’ and it was almost taboo,” Ronen told me. “Now ‘plant-based’ sounds more exotic. Vegan was this old-school hippie Woodstock-y kind of thing. ‘Plant-based’ sounds more like Jay-Z.”

I visited the casually elegant Upper West Side location on a blustery Sunday. It was bustling. My favorite part about exploring Manhattan’s vegan fare is hearing restaurant staff describe each dish. Vegan cooking is an exercise in sleight of hand, in hoodwinking your senses in ways that bewilder carnivores like myself. Things are not always what they seem, vegan chefs want to remind. And so it goes at Blossom, where the salmon and scallop entree is made of beet-marinated, flame-grilled tofu surrounded by trumpet mushrooms that, by tricks of grilling and seasoning, become stand-ins for scallops.

Approximating steak, cheese, eggs and seafood is one approach to plant-based fare. The other is to simply take veggies, fruits and beans and put them front and center, like shining the spotlight on performers who’ve sung backup their whole lives.

“How often do you see a meal where butter beans are the main focus?” said the waiter at abcV as he delivered a plate of applewood-smoked butter beans that sat atop a butter bean puree accompanied by crispy maitake, a curlicue mushroom, fried capers and ginger-rosemary vinaigrette.

AbcV, two blocks from Union Square, is the plant-based entrant in uber-chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s empire. (Unlike the other restaurants I tried, there are vegetarian dishes available here as well.) It’s a vast space with high ceilings, rustic-chic touches and a kitchen behind glass where cooks maneuver as if playing a team sport. I sat at a counter that faces an open prep area where staffers peeled and mashed beets, laid out Technicolor radish slices on a tray, and prepared dairy-free desserts like chocolate layer cake and chocolate mousse parfait.

The executive chef here is Neal Harden, a youthful Maine native who moved to Bali to open a restaurant there and traveled extensively in Southeast Asian. The region’s cooking customs inform his dishes today. He told me, for instance, that in much of Asia seitan is not used to impersonate meat; it’s an ingredient in its own right. He marvelously demonstrates how that works with a dish featuring tempeh glazed with spicy kecap, a sweet-and-spicy Indonesian-style soy sauce with charred banana, black garlic and cilantro.

It’s hardly unusual to find vegan food at a Manhattan restaurant, but what’s interesting is the sheer diversity of dedicated vegan eateries. In Harlem I stopped by Uptown Veg, where plant-based versions of Caribbean- and Latin American-accented fare are sold by the pound. Owner and longtime vegan David Simmons, who was born in Guyana, opened it in 1993. During a recent Thursday lunch rush, a woman in a suit, a man in a bus-driver uniform, a mother with a toddler and a teenager sporting a Yankees jersey waited in line for plates piled high with jerk chicken, stuffed chile peppers, rib cutlets and lasagna layered with yucca-based cheese.

I tried a margherita-style pizza with just-tangy-enough cashew mozzarella at Double Zero, a polished East Village restaurant that’s part of Matthew Kenney’s empire. The Californian, a plant-based-dining evangelist, has businesses in more than 20 cities, including Sydney and Bogota. And I did a double take, figuring I must have been in the wrong place, when I walked into Jajaja Plantas Mexicana and witnessed a couple digging into a towering plate of nachos, doused in cheese. The plant-based destination on the Lower East Side is retrofitted into an old ice cream shop, its original gorgeous tile still mostly intact. (There are sibling locations in the West Village and Williamsburg in Brooklyn.)

And I sampled an assortment of small plates, each a clever display of fragrant Indian-influenced fusion fare, at Night Music. It’s the latest project by Ravi DeRossi, the restaurant mogul who’s made waves on the New York dining circuit with his efforts to turn his empire – or at least most of it – vegan.

Ravi has created a radically diverse suite of bars and restaurants. He oversees the tiki bar Mother of Pearl; the craft-beer bar Proletariat; Amor y Amargo, an intimate bitters- and amari-focused haunt with tiled surfaces that evoke Madrid; Ladybird, a Baroque-accented “vegetable bar,” and more. A new addition to the collection is Honeybee’s, an Old West-style saloon specializing in vegan barbecue and American whiskey and named for his pit bull-greyhound mix. But perhaps the crowning jewel of the kingdom is Avant Garden, an upscale farmhouse-chic sanctuary with an open kitchen and imaginative plant-based menu.

Drew Brady, the general manager, described dishes in language that’s equal parts technical and whimsical. And intriguing entree that appeared to be noodles was spiralized celery root with a thick mushroom reduction that gets creamy when the vegetable moisture hits high heat. A carbonara dish gets its pancetta-like note from the mix of charred spring onion and smoked white onion.

And there was my guarantee that I’ll never think about vegetables the same way again.

– – –

If you go

Where to eat

abcV

38 E. 19th St.

212-475-5829

jean-georges.com/restaurants/united-states/new-york/abcv

Part of the Jean-Georges Vongerichten empire, this spacious restaurant, a study in muted glamour, is sibling to ABC Kitchen, the neighboring eatery, both located in the home store of the same name. Many of Chef Neal Harden’s vegetable-forward dishes nod to Southeast Asian flavors and techniques and showcase produce from local farmers. Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner; hours vary. Entrees from $17.

Avant Garden

130 E. Seventh St.

646-922-7948

avantgardennyc.com/

Nearly every dish is a surprise at this upscale farmhouse-chic plant-based spot in the East Village, part of a suite of hip, stylish and plant-based bars and eateries by New York restaurant magnate Ravi DeRossi. Senses do double takes at dishes that will mystify committed carnivores. Open daily 5 to 10 p.m. Entrees from $18.

Blossom on Columbus

507 Columbus Ave.

212-875-2600

blossomnyc.com/columbus

Since 2005, before Impossible Burger was a twinkle in a vegan’s eye, Blossom was making imaginative use of plant-based ingredients to create wholesome and intriguing dishes like jackfruit tacos, seitan piccata and rigatoni. Founder Ronen Seri runs two outposts – one on the Upper West Side and one in Chelsea – and co-authored a vegan cookbook in 2017. Open for lunch Monday to Saturday 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.; Sunday 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Dinner nightly 5 to 9:45 p.m. Lunch entrees from $16 and dinner from $17.

Délice & Sarrasin

20 Christopher St.

212-243-7200

delicesarrasin.com/

Beef bourguignon, coq au vin, foie gras, escargot and all the other French standards are inventively prepared without any of the keystone meat or dairy ingredients at this cozy, elegant, family-owned West Village bistro, run by a former oncological surgeon. Open daily 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. First course from $9; entrees from $15.

Jajaja Plantas Mexicana Lower East Side

162 E. Broadway

646-883-5453

jajajamexicana.com/

Hearts of palm take the starring role in ceviche, hempseed- and flaxseed-battered chayote squash stands in for fish in a taco, and plant-based sausage and chorizo give Mexican staples their familiar smoky flavor at this trio of modern Mexican restaurants with locations in the West Village, Lower East Side and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. The Manhattan locales feature tequila- and mezcal-centric bars. Open Sunday to Wednesday 11 a.m. to midnight and Thursday to Saturday 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Tacos from $8 and entrees from $12.

Night Music

111 E. 7th St.

646-767-0476

nightmusicny.com/

Located less than a half-block from Avant Garden, DeRossi’s moody, clubby hangout features small plates of plant-based Indian-fusion fare inspired by his mother’s cooking. Cauliflower tacos, turmeric crepes and mushroom-tofu-black pepper curry dumplings are just a few of the innovative options here. Open Monday to Thursday 5 to 11 p.m.; Friday and Saturday 5 p.m. to midnight; Sunday 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Snacks like spring rolls, buns and chutneys from $4; small plates from $12.

Uptown Veg

52 E. 125th St.

212-987-2660

wapo.st/Uptown-Veg

Vegan food comes by the pound ($7.99 to $8.99 per pound) at this cafeteria-style Harlem restaurant. Choose from sweet-and-sour seitan, meatballs, vegetable curries, lasagna, jerk chicken and other plant-based selections, many of which nod to Caribbean classics. Fresh juices are on offer. Owner David Simmons also makes Kamuni Creek, a line of bottled drinks made with fruit pulp imported from the Caribbean. Open Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sunday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Information

nycgo.com/

– L.W.

“After much consideration, and exhausting every opportunity for #AmericanAirlines to do the right thing, I’ve decided to share my assault, from the passenger behind me, and the further threats, from an American Airline flight attendant,” a user named Wendi Williams wrote on Twitter last week.

The incident began on an American Eagle regional flight from New Orleans to Charlotte after Williams was returning from a teaching convention. A man – who is unidentified in the video clip posted to her Twitter – allegedly asked Williams to position her seat upright as he ate. She did, and when he finished, Williams reclined her seat again.

“At that point, he started hammering away at me,” she wrote. “That’s when I started videoing and tried to call” the flight attendant.

Then, according to Williams, the man became agitated and began to perform a punching motion against the back of her seat, shaking her as the nudging continued. “He was angry that I reclined my seat and punched it about 9 times,” she wrote. “HARD, at which point I began videoing him, and he resigned to this behavior.”

Williams said after she called for a flight attendant to intervene, not only was she of no help but, in her view, she also made a bad situation worse. “She rolled her eyes at me and said, ‘What?’ she wrote. “She then told him it was tight back there and gave him rum!”

Another Twitter user, who responded to Williams’ tweets, asked how she was feeling after the experience, to which Williams replied using “#whiplash.” “I’m in pain,” she wrote. “I have 1 cervical disk left that isn’t fused – the first 1 which allows me some mobility. It’s scary bc it’s this the kind of injury that could do it in.”

In the time since the incident, Williams said she’s had to absorb medical costs and a loss of wages. “I’ve lost time at work, had to visit a doctor, got x-rays” and cited headaches for a week, she wrote.

Reaction across social media has been split, with hundreds of users admonishing the male passenger’s behavior: “There is no reason to allow people to act like he did. That’s why they allow you to pick your seat when you book your flight. Obviously he picked the wrong row or bought the cheapest ticket available,” one user wrote.

And hundreds more have criticized Williams for being cavalier about reclining her seat, which some fliers do not view as a right: It “seems you started this in the first place by reclining your seat too far. Just don’t recline,” one user wrote, adding, “Basic etiquette.”

As for the airline at the center of the incident, Williams said she spoke with American Airlines after causing a firestorm on Twitter – the video is nearing 300,000 views – but wasn’t satisfied that “they apologized but really didn’t accept any responsibility for the flight attendant’s actions”:

“I was contacted via phone by @AmericanAir, they apologized but really didn’t accept any responsibility for the flight attendant’s actions. I will be calling the FBI to press charges against the ‘man’ who mistook me for a punching bag. Anyone who doesn’t like it, I don’t care!

“- wendi (@steelersfanOG) February 9, 2020”

As of Thursday, it’s unclear whether Williams has or will pursue charges against the passenger or American Airlines.

“We are aware of a customer dispute that transpired on American Eagle flight 4392, operated by Republic Airways on January 31. The safety and comfort of our customers and team members is our top priority, and our team is looking into the issue,” the airline said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Bathing in or drinking the water – a.k.a. “quaffing the elixir” – has been a public commodity since 1832, when President Andrew Jackson deemed what’s now Hot Springs National Park protected land – 40 years before Yellowstone. During the Golden Era of Bathing (1880 to 1950), the mineral-rich H2O was thought to have medicinal properties, and, encouraged by their doctors, the ailing flocked to them for relief from conditions such as arthritis and back pain. At first, accommodations were rudimentary – wooden shacks built atop a gurgling spring – but eventually, the waters’ healing reputation and laws requiring more sanitary and fireproof buildings shaped Hot Springs into a destination nicknamed “the American Spa.” Its marquee attraction is Bathhouse Row, a collection of eight imposing stone buildings that line Central Avenue in downtown Hot

Springs, each with its own unique architectural style. Of course, these were white, wealthy endeavors; African Americans were mostly banned from using the bathhouses where they worked, forcing them to build their own nearby. What’s more, a bathhouse regimen could cost as much as 55 cents, an average worker’s daily salary in 1915 (the government did provide the needy a free bathhouse, which was later segregated). By 1921, the popularity of Hot Springs – whose baths were said to rival those of ancient Rome – led to its creation as our 18th national park. Yet as new medicines developed in the 1950s, therapeutic bathing declined, and business dried up. By 1985, only the Buckstaff Bathhouse remained open (and still is, boasting continuous operation from 1912).

But that wasn’t the end of Bathhouse Row. The Park Service has restored and repurposed most of the buildings, from Superior, which houses a brewery and the world’s only thermal water beer; to the Hale, a luxury hotel; to Quapaw, a modern spa; to the Ozark, a cultural center and art gallery. The tour de force is the Fordyce Bathhouse, an ornate Renaissance Revival structure built in 1915 that’s now home to the national park’s visitor center and museum. Civil War veteran Samuel Fordyce, who was brought to Hot Springs on a stretcher and walked out six months later, believed so deeply in the powers of the hot springs that he set out to “erect the finest bathing establishment in the world.”

On our first morning in Hot Springs, myself, my husband, and our 17-month-old son walked the short distance from our grandiose 1924-era hotel, the Arlington, down magnolia-lined Central Avenue to the marble lobby of the Fordyce for a tour. Ranger Kary Goetz got one thing out of the way: There aren’t any outdoor hot springs to bathe in. The water seeps out of the ground at a scalding 143 degrees, which is why the bathhouses control the temperature for bathers, at between 98 and 104. In the men’s white-tiled bath hall, Goetz passed around a plastic bottle of thermal water, still warm. “You’re holding history in your hands,” he said, explaining the water fell as rainwater 4,000 years ago and is just now rising to the surface via a complex geothermal process occurring within the rock layers under our feet. Goetz then took us through a 1900s-era day at the bathhouse: First, soaking in the tub while an attendant scrubs your back and limbs; then being wrapped in hot towels, called “hot packs”; next, a few minutes in the vapor, or steam cabinet (sort of like an outhouse-shaped sauna); a dip in the sitz bath, a bidet-like structure said to soothe hemorrhoids; and finally the needle shower, in which pressurized jets hit you with water all over.

The oddest contraption – and Goetz’s “absolute favorite” – is the long-defunct hydrotherapy bathtub, in which an attendant stuck an electric probe in the bathwater, issuing shocks to supposedly relax tight muscles or activate nonfunctioning ones. Our tour ended in the men’s dressing room, where a stained-glass skylight depicts Neptune’s daughter and other underwater whimsies in striking blues and greens. A statue of 16th-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto receiving a gift of thermal water from an American Indian sits at the center of the room – it’s unlikely he ever did, but it sure helped with advertising, Goetz said. The Quapaw and Caddo peoples lived here for thousands of years, mining the region’s ubiquitous novaculite, a type of flint stone, for weapons.

We wandered the rest of the museum, from the women’s bath hall (their dressing room was much less fancy) to the sunny third-floor assembly room, where the conservative Edwardian-era men and women mingled amid an opulence of mosaic floor tiles, a grand piano and decorative stained-glass ceilings. (I was miffed to read men were permitted to sunbathe nude in the third-floor courtyard, while women had to exercise in formal lace dresses.) Down the hall, a large, hardwood-floor gymnasium may have attracted bathers hoping to see famous baseball players in town for spring training, which originated in Hot Springs in the 1880s. Indeed, many well-known men, notorious and otherwise, passed through Hot Springs, including Babe Ruth and Al Capone. “This was Vegas before Vegas was even dreamed of,” Goetz told me. “Pick your vice.” Across the street from elegant Bathhouse Row, cocaine dens, brothels, gambling establishments and clubs thrived. Capone kept tabs on his favorite casino, the Southern Club – now the Josephine Tussaud Wax Museum – from the window of his fourth-floor suite in the Arlington.

Speaking of Scarface, he also regularly took the waters, and may have used the alias Al Brown to bathe on Bathhouse Row (though there are no records, of course). He also frequented the Arlington’s third-floor bathhouse, where I checked into my 2 p.m. appointment feeling a little nervous. Would it be weird being rubbed down by a stranger? I needn’t have worried; attendant Glenda Porter, a 31-year employee, put me instantly at ease. After giving me a quick loofah scrub in the porcelain tub, she wrapped me in a sheet, toga-like, and instructed me to lie down on a lounge chair in the main bathhall, covering me head-to-toe in steamy towels. The heavy cloth immobilized my limbs, the whirlpool baths churned pleasantly in the background, and, with no smartphone or other distractions, I was forced to succumb to the present. Aha, I thought: Now I get it. The waters’ medical benefit may be questionable, but the soothing impact on my mind was anything but.

The next afternoon at Buckstaff, I entered another beautiful marble lobby, where an attendant brought me into an old hand-operated elevator for a ride to the second floor. Though less spalike (no fragrant bath salts available with the tub soak, for instance) this bathhouse experience was more authentic, as I got to try a sitz bath, vapor cabinet and needle shower. The sitz bath was underwhelming, but I enjoyed the novelty of the vapor cabinet, where I sat sweating with my head in a wooden yoke. The needle shower was invigorating, the water reviving muscles made rubbery in the hot steam of the vapor cabinet.

Refreshed, we explored more of Hot Springs, which, as the second smallest national park (Gateway Arch edged it out in 2018) is compact and easy to navigate. At Hot Water Cascade, a waterfall near our hotel, tendrils of steam rose from the water as it tumbled down the rocks, prompting a chorus of “Wa wa!” (water) from my son. We strolled the Grand Promenade, a red-brick path above Bathhouse Row and a conduit to some of the park’s 26 miles of hiking trails on Hot Springs Mountain and North Mountain. At the town’s “jug fountains,” locals queued to fill bottles of thermal water; the public consumes about 700,000 gallons a day. “Good?” I asked one woman. “I wouldn’t be wasting all this energy hauling it if it weren’t,” she said, laughing.

Driving back to the Little Rock airport the next morning, a regret popped into my mind: Maybe I shouldn’t have sold that antique claw-foot bathtub that came with my apartment. I could use a good soak now and then.

– – –

If you go

Where to stay

The Arlington Hotel

239 Central Ave.

800-643-1502

arlingtonhotel.com/

The largest hotel in Arkansas, this Southern treasure features a grand lobby and elegant Venetian dining room. Try the Mineral Water Room, whose bathtub features thermal water straight from the hot springs. Standard rates for two adults from $135; Mineral Water Room from $179 per night.

– – –

Where to eat

Superior Bathhouse Brewery

329 Central Ave.

501-624-2337

superiorbathhouse.com/

Located in one of the historic bathhouses, this is the first brewery in a U.S. national park. The Hitchcock Spring Kolsch is delicious; pair it with a soft pretzel and the kolsch-infused beer cheese. Open daily at 11 a.m. Entrees from $9.

– – –

What to do

Hot Springs National Park

101 Reserve St.

501-620-6715

nps.gov/hosp/

Relax in thermal waters piped right from the hot springs, hike through rare shortleaf pine forests, or look out over the rolling Ouachita Mountains from the 216-foot-tall Hot Springs Mountain Tower. Daily ranger tours take visitors through the various bathing and medical facilities of the luxurious Fordyce Bathhouse, as well as to the park’s visible hot springs, where they explain geologic processes behind the mineral water. Free park admission and tours.

The Gangster Museum of America

510 Central Ave.

501-318-1717

tgmoa.com/

Get the lowdown on Hot Springs’ seamier side in this museum, whose audiovisual galleries explore the lives of famous criminals in the Valley of the Vapors. Highlights include John Dillinger’s death mask and original gambling equipment from a Prohibition-era speakeasy, including roulette tables. Open daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday to Thursday and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday. General admission $15 adults, $14 seniors and $6 children 8 to 12.

Bashar Wali, president of Provenance Hotels, lamented the sorry state of hotel tipping in a post on LinkedIn this past July, in which he argued around the idea of tipping as fair compensation, and that it’s more like an expression of gratitude, a “personal acknowledgment” to those who “are exposed to the worst parts of us [piles of dirty laundry, hangovers, room service leftovers] and get the least appreciation.”

An increasingly cashless society, digital checkout features, the mad dash to the airport-they all make tipping harder, but they aren’t good enough excuses.

The comments piled in. “If only there was an app for that …” multiple people said.

Now there is. TipYo debuted on Apple’s App Store in November, promising to streamline the tipping experience for travelers everywhere. Except that right now, it’s only available at Wali’s Hotel Murano, in Tacoma, Washington, where it’s been in a soft launch. (An Android version is coming in the first quarter of this year.)

The premise is simple: Once your receive your hotel room number, you can enter it in the app and have gratuities sent to a particular staffer or a general department (housekeeping, bell service, concierge, valet). Amounts can be selected from presets or customized, and the money is funded by Apple Pay (if you’ve set that up on your phone), or you can add a credit or debit card as a payment method. To ensure tips go to the correct person, even when you don’t remember their names, hotel managers upload employees’ shift schedules and can set rules around when tips should be pooled.

TipYo founder Brian Walsh isn’t a hospitality guy, but he had grown frustrated with the tipping experience. “I rarely carried cash-even less so than usual in the last five years, since now we live in an era where we can order an Uber, check our bank accounts, order food, and pay people directly from our phones,” Walsh tells Bloomberg. He wondered why tipping wasn’t the same.

But he knew the answer: “The payments world is not for the fainthearted,” he says.

His previous company helped churches process electronic donations, so he had experience clearing the regulatory hurdles that a tipping app would require. “We understand the space, its federal regulations, what’s expected from the IRS,” he says, making it easier for him to securely untangle a complicated money flow. The beauty of it, he says, “is you can confidently leave a gratuity and know that money is going into the right employees’ paychecks.” (Although unlike off-the-books cash, it can be taxed.)

So far, adoption is slow but encouraging, Walsh says. The app was quietly deployed at Wali’s 300-room Hotel Murano late last November; in the two months that followed, 80 guests tipped through the app. This is with low-season occupancy rates and almost zero promotion, Walsh says, adding that those early numbers exceeded expectations.

To encourage app downloads, the hotel’s first approach was to leave a little bit of marketing material on hotel room desks, but even Wali admits that “people don’t look at anything in the room.” So in the past month, the property has starting plugging TipYo in its pre-arrival emails.

“My concern was always the issue of adoption, because of the idea that you have to download an app and put your info in, but so far it looks like people are inclined to do it,” Wali says. “We’ve taken the pain out of the cash thing.”

Walsh knows that the market for TipYo could be enormous. “There are 5 million hotel rooms in the U.S. alone, and the independent luxury market [which is TipYo’s sweet spot] is roughly 800 to 1,000 hotels,” he says. TipYo signs monthly agreements with hotels, which pay a flat fee for the service; there’s no cost to the consumer or employees receiving tips.

“Beyond that, you have everybody from Marriott to Hilton and all the brands they own,” says Walsh, who’s hoping that once one big brand commits to the technology, pressure will mount for others to jump on the bandwagon. Ultimately these larger brands could also incorporate TipYo’s tech into their own digital platforms.

“After all, one of the greatest challenges in hospitality right now is employee retention, and we’re helping to increase the take-home pay of staff who could otherwise go down the street and work for Amazon for an extra $3 an hour,” he says.

Yet even for committed operators like Wali, syncing each hotel’s back-end system with TipYo’s platform can be a barrier-uploading those shift schedules and linking to payroll can seem like an encumbrance for managers already spread thin. And then there’s the fact that not every hotel uses the same back-end technology; getting the second Provenance property (out of 14 total) up and running will take another six months, give or take.

Add complex labor union legislation to that-which is preventing Walsh from partnering with hotels in certain parts of the country, like New York City-and the complications of regulations in different countries, and the road ahead is a long one. For now, TipYo is focusing on the domestic market, which makes the app less relevant for high-tipping Americans who may not carry foreign currency abroad.

“I’m not sure why I need it,” says Jack Ezon, founder and managing partner of Embark Beyond, a high-end travel agency that works equally in business and leisure bookings. But necessity isn’t the mother of all invention-see how Uber has generated millions in gratuities for drivers, despite serious initial reluctance from passengers.

Most of Ezon’s guests, he says, would be more likely to tip at checkout for easy expense itemization back at work. The potential he sees is largely outside the hotel. “If it could tell me how much to tip my driver, my guide, my head concierge, and give me both functionality and guidance that I could turn on and off-that would be a dream.”

“Sorry, not sorry,” I replied good-naturedly. After all, I was just doing my job as a food and travel writer-photographer.

“So how do you figure out where you’re going to eat?” she asked.

It’s a question I get asked a lot. People seem to think I have to access secret information otherwise unavailable to the public. Don’t get me wrong, I have an edge thanks to more than two decades of experience and my industry connections, but I ferret out many of my favorite meals on the road through thorough research that people could do themselves. Frankly, I’m glad most travelers don’t bother, because I make a living from it. But by following a few simple tips, anyone can dine around the world like a food writer.

These days, I start my exploratory process on social media, usually months before a trip. On Facebook and Twitter, I’ll ask my friends and followers to chime in with suggestions on where to eat – no boundaries. In the case of Tulum, I was on the lookout for places ranging from humble roadside taco stands and open-air markets to high-end restaurants and hotels with great restaurants. Though my acquaintances in the hospitality world often have excellent recommendations, some of the best tips come from everyday travelers (or the friends they tag), eager to share their favorite discoveries. Next, I switch over to Instagram to see who is posting the most enticing food pics from the destination. I’ll virtually stalk regional influencers and food-focused influencers who have visited recently, then do deep dives into their posts and likes from the area.

It’s helpful to review the food and travel publications you trust. I always check out to see what Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Eater and The Washington Post have written about a destination. Review sites such as Tripadvisor and Yelp can be helpful for places not thoroughly covered by journalists, though I am leery of the advice of strangers whose motives and expertise I can’t ascertain. Another caveat: I seek out these sites’ advice only for restaurants in the low- to middle-price range, because I find the reviews of fine dining establishments are often uninformed and unhelpful on a variety of levels. Eating regularly at high-end restaurants requires a certain budget and lifestyle, so for many people, visiting them is a rare occasion. This often means they will either have unrealistic expectations or fail to notice the many small but immensely significant components that go into creating a next-level dining experience, such as service elements, the minutiae of the beverage program or rarefied culinary techniques.

You can’t just rely on the Web to guide your decisions. I personally ask anyone I know who might have been to the region – passionate travelers, die-hard foodies, hospitality professionals, and people with familial or cultural roots there. If you know the Italian chef at your favorite trattoria, by all means ask her where to eat before you go to Umbria. And don’t forget to reach out to the local visitor’s bureau, as it can offer a wealth of information, including news about restaurants that are on the verge of opening.

It’s helpful to read up on the culinary traditions and history of the region to ascertain what you should expect and what specialties to seek out, so pick up a few relevant guidebooks, cookbooks, travelogues or memoirs before you go. They will help give you a richer sense of a place and may push you to explore unexpected activities. Before departing for Tulum, I flipped through Moon’s Tulum guidebook and “Yucatán: Recipes From a Culinary Expedition” by David Sterling. The latter inspired me to seek out a cooking class at Riviera Maya Kitchen, where I made tortillas from scratch while learning about the foundational role corn plays in Mexican cuisine.

As I’m doing my online and offline survey, I compile a digital list of all the potential spots to visit, making sure to tally multiple mentions of a place. Ultimately, I save those that pique my interest most on Google Maps, so I can get an overview of options. The map also makes it easier to decide where to eat if I suddenly have a break in my schedule or if an establishment is unexpectedly closed.

Before leaving home, I’ll trace out a tentative itinerary and make any reservations necessary, especially at any hard-to-access restaurants. If you have personal connections to any of the places you’re dining, let your contact know when you plan on stopping by. It can be helpful to have a friendly face guiding you through the experience – and maybe offer you VIP perks, like a kitchen tour or an introduction to the chef.

Don’t think your work has ended once your travel begins. Keep your eyes open, quiz everyone you meet – cabdrivers, concierges, bartenders, chefs and fellow travelers can be particularly helpful – and adjust your itinerary accordingly. I often find a natural flow develops. Tulum was no different. Because it was the most recommended place on my list, I made a point of dining twice at Arca, an exceptionally executed, modernist minded venture from Mexican American chef Jose Luis Hinostroza, an alum of Noma and Alinea. I had a chance to chat with him, so I asked him about his favorite taquerias. He turned me on to the cochinita pibil stuffed ones at Honorio Taqueria and the al pastor tacos at La Chiapaneca, which were some of my favorite bites of the trip. While I was walking to the latter, I discovered Ki’bok Coffee, which serves excellent espresso and notable handmade pastries, including a jammy blackberry bar.

Other highlights included Safari, which I first saw on Instagram, a charmingly offbeat taqueria crafting unconventional options (the highlight was one packed with roasted octopus) out of an Airstream-turned-kitchen with an open fire out front. A rep from the visitor’s bureau mentioned NÜ, which specializes in picture-ready contemporary Mexican fare. And there were several outstanding breakfasts at Casa Malca, suggested by several friends on Facebook, a chic beachfront hotel populated by contemporary artworks sourced by its gallerist owner and designed to look good from every angle, so it was impossible to go more than a few minutes without seeing someone take a selfie in front of something.

All in all, my two weeks in Tulum were packed solid with memorable meals, many of which I documented in envy-inducing pictures I posted on Instagram. It was a trip worthy of a food writer – or anyone willing to do the research.