How to choose a weekend-break city for the food

A weekend is six meals, give or take: Friday dinner, two breakfasts, two lunches and Saturday dinner. Choose the wrong city and two of them happen on a train, one is at a restaurant that turns out to be shut on Sundays, and another is whatever is open near the station. The method works for any shortlist: start with the meal you want, keep the journey short, check when the city eats and when it closes, then book in the order that protects the table you care about most.

Start with the meal you want

Before you look at a map, decide what kind of eating the weekend is for. Cities are good at different things, and a shortlist built on the meal is shorter and better than one built on flight prices.

• A long lunch. Somewhere lunch is the main meal and a set menu at midday is normal, so the best cooking of the day costs less and fits between the sights.
• Markets and counters. A covered market hall, stalls and bars where you eat standing up or at a counter, mostly walk-ins.
• Bakeries and coffee. Mornings built around a bakery that sells out by eleven and a café worth crossing town for.
• One big dinner. A single tasting menu you have wanted for months, with the rest of the weekend kept simple around it.
• Wine bars and small plates. Evenings spent at a natural wine bar or two, eating late and lightly.

Pick one as the reason for the trip and treat the rest as a bonus. Our Destinations section takes cities one at a time, with the food in view.

Keep the journey short

Count door to door, not take-off to landing: the trip to the airport, the queue at security, the flight, passport control and the ride into town. If that comes to more than about four hours each way, you lose a meal at each end, and a six-meal weekend becomes four.

Rail often wins here, because you start and finish in the city centre. From London, Eurostar’s city breaks by train page lists its direct routes: Lille is 1 hour 22 minutes from St Pancras, and Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam are each under four hours. Leave after lunch on Friday and the nearest of them still gives you dinner.

Whatever you travel on, time the arrival for a meal. Landing at 13:00 in a city that lunches at 14:00 is ideal. Landing at 16:00 in one where kitchens close between lunch and dinner means a sandwich and a long wait.

Check when the city eats

A city’s meal times decide how the weekend runs. Get them wrong and you arrive hungry at a closed kitchen, or sit down to dinner in an empty room.

Lunch and dinner hours

Some countries eat far later than the UK, and the gap is wider than most people plan for. Spain.info, the country’s official tourism site, says restaurants tend to serve lunch between 13:00 and 16:00 and dinner between 20:00 and 23:30. France eats earlier: Wikivoyage’s guide to France has lunch from noon, with last arrivals around 13:30, and dinner from about 19:30 to 21:30.

Plan the weekend on local time, not home time. In a late-eating city a 14:00 arrival is lunch, not a missed lunch, and a 19:00 booking may mean dining alone.

Closing days and holidays

Many restaurants close one or two days a week, and the day varies from place to place, so watch Sunday and Monday. Wikivoyage warns that in France a restaurant open on Saturday, and especially on Sunday, can be hard to find away from the tourist areas, and that many smaller shops, bakeries among them, close for parts of August outside those areas. Public holidays close more again, so look up the country’s calendar for your dates; Spain.info lists Spain’s national holidays on the same page as its meal times.

Tip: Before you book a train or a flight, open the website of the one place you most want to eat at and find its opening days, its holiday dates and how far ahead it takes bookings. If it is shut on the only evening you have, change the weekend or change the city.

Score your shortlist

With two or three cities in mind, run each one through the same five checks. The city that passes most of them on your dates is your weekend, even if another is cheaper to reach.

Check	What you want to see	Where to look
Door to door	Four hours or less, arriving in time for a meal	Rail and airline timetables
Meal times	Lunch and dinner hours that fit your arrival and departure	The country’s tourism site or a travel guide
Closing days	Your main places open on Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday	Each restaurant’s own website
Booking window	Tables you can book now, or a counter that takes walk-ins	The restaurant’s booking page
Season and holidays	No public holiday or summer closure on your dates	The country’s holiday calendar

A city that fails on closing days or holidays is rarely worth forcing; keep it for another weekend.

Book in the right order

Most people book the travel first and the tables last, which is backwards when the meals are the point. Book in this order:

1. The table that is hardest to get. Find out when its bookings open and be ready at that hour. If it takes walk-ins only, find out when the queue starts.
2. The train or flight around it. Arrive in time for that meal with room to spare, and leave after the last one you care about.
3. A hotel within walking distance of dinner. A short walk back after a late meal beats a taxi across town. Our Where to Stay section covers choosing the neighbourhood and the room, and is it cheaper to book a hotel direct? shows how to check the price for your stay.
4. The lunches. Book the ones that take bookings; for counters and walk-ins, plan to be there when they open.
5. One open meal. Leave one slot unplanned for the place you walk past on Saturday morning and want to go back to.

Once the city and the hardest table are fixed, planning a food trip day by day fills in the other meals. If you would rather have the bookings worked out for you, each City Tables edition lists the tables to book ahead, how far ahead and how.

Pack light and check your passport

A weekend fits in a cabin bag, and a cabin bag means no wait at the carousel. A soft holdall and a small spinner both work; check the bag’s size, wheels and handles included, against your airline’s cabin limit before you buy. Our guide to choosing a cabin bag shows how to measure one and sets out the allowances airline by airline, and the luggage on our Kit page is sized for European airlines’ cabin rules.

If you are travelling from the UK to the Schengen area, check your passport before you book anything. GOV.UK’s entry requirements for France say it must have been issued less than 10 years before the date you arrive and must expire at least three months after the date you plan to leave the Schengen area. The same page notes that the EU’s Entry/Exit System is replacing passport stamps. ETIAS, the travel authorisation the EU plans for visitors who don’t need a visa, hasn’t started: the European Commission says it is not in operation yet and will announce the start date several months ahead. Read the GOV.UK page for the country you are visiting before you book.