The Solo Traveller
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Culinary experiences
The most powerful way to understand a place is share time in it with the people who call it home. Image courtesy Eatwith.
One table, many stories
By Geoffrey Williams
Briefly …
For solo travellers, shared meals are emerging as a powerful antidote to isolation on the road. Eatwith replaces solitary dining with meaningful connection, inviting travellers into local homes and cultures through food. By centring local voices, lived knowledge, and genuine hospitality, Eatwith offers a vision of travelling solo informed by depth, cultural exchange, and belonging.
For solo travellers, meals can be one of the most emotionally loaded parts of a journey. Eating alone can reinforce a sense of unwelcome isolation, even on our most invigorating journeys and in the most exciting destinations. A place at a local table replaces the awkward solo reservation, offering companionship without obligation and conversation without performance.
Just as importantly, shared meals open a rare social space where connections form naturally across cultures. Sitting down together dissolves many of the barriers that solo travellers can face when trying to meet people on the road. Locals and fellow travellers meet on equal footing, drawn together by curiosity rather than convenience. Stories flow, recommendations are exchanged, friendships sometimes linger beyond the meal, and the destination becomes populated not just with landmarks, but with faces and voices. In this way, food becomes a social bridge, allowing solo travellers to connect deeply, briefly, and meaningfully, without ever having to stop travelling on their own.
As solo travellers rethink how and why we move through the world, a quieter shift is underway. We are now searching for journeys grounded in meaning, cultural understanding, and genuine human connection, and not settling for what a place looks like, but how it feels to live there.
Eatwith replaces solitary dining with meaningful connection, inviting travellers into local homes and venues to experience new cultures through food. Image courtesy Eatwith.
This is the terrain Eatwith has been navigating for more than a decade. As the world’s largest community for food-based travel experiences, the platform has long been built on a simple idea: that the most powerful way to understand a place is share time in it with the people who call it home. Rather than positioning locals as performers or cultural intermediaries, Eatwith places them at the centre of the story. Hosts decide how their culture is shared, what stories are told, and how hospitality is extended. The result is not a polished product, but something more human, resulting in shared dining experiences shaped by lived knowledge, personal history, and a sense of pride in place.
A selection of the dining areas offered by Eatwith hosts around the world. Images courtesy Eatwith.
Jean-Michel Petit, Founder and CEO of Eatwith, believes this shift reflects a broader reckoning within global tourism. Travellers want to understand the places they visit, and that understanding can only come from the people who live there. Eatwith’s role is to build the infrastructure that allows those voices to be heard, empowering hosts to share their culture on their own terms, and create encounters with foundations firmly planted in respect, belonging, and meaning.
Food, in this vision, is far more than sustenance, it is a living archive. Recipes passed between generations, cooking techniques learned by watching and participating rather than reading, table rituals that reveal values, relationships, friendships, and rhythms of daily life. At an Eatwith table, these elements are not curated artefacts, they are shared, explained, questioned, and kept alive through conversation.
Hosts are empowered to share their culture on their own terms, and create encounters with foundations firmly planted in respect, belonging, and meaning. Images courtesy Eatwith.
Guests are not spectators, they are participants. They listen, ask, taste, and engage. Hospitality becomes a two-way exchange, where cultural understanding is built slowly, one story and one shared dish at a time. In Paris, home dinners unfold where neighbourhood history, art, and personal memory are woven into the meal. In Rome, cooking experiences bring together multiple generations, preserving traditions not as museum pieces, but as collective practice. In London, seasonal harvest tables reflect the land, the time of year, and a shared sense of belonging shaped by food.
Cooking experiences bring together multiple generations, preserving traditions not as museum pieces, but as collective practice. Images courtesy Eatwith.
What matters here is not scale, but depth. Eatwith’s focus is not on how many experiences can be delivered, but on how meaningful those encounters can be for everyone involved. For hosts, it is an opportunity to preserve and share cultural knowledge and love for a place, while also earning an income. For solo travellers, it is a chance to step inside the everyday life of a much-loved place and leave with lasting memories, and possibly new friendships that may well last a lifetime.
Eatwith food tours. Image courtesy Eatwith.
To learn more, you can connect with the Eatwith team on their website here.
Geoffrey Williams is The Solo Traveller Group’s Founder and Publishing Curator.