First-time visitor rules that save the meal
A direct etiquette guide for first-time visitors: five practical rules that reduce restaurant friction, improve staff interaction, and get you better food with fewer mistakes.
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Vol. I · Field notes
Eat where the room already trusts itself
iam.hungrybutnotstupid.com
I am hungry, and I am not stupid.
I’ve eaten badly in too many cities to keep being polite about it. These are short, opinionated notes on why travelers keep ending up at the wrong table, what the room is actually telling you, and how to stop outsourcing your dinner to a star rating that has never set foot in your neighborhood.
The 60-second etiquette scan before you sit
One minute outside a restaurant can prevent most avoidable travel-meal regret. A simple scan for doorway flow, table mix, staff rhythm, and menu terms.
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How to enter a local restaurant without acting like a tourist
Practical local behavior for travelers: how to arrive, order, and settle cleanly so staff can focus on your meal instead of avoidable friction.
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Why tourist traps keep winning
The tourist trap isn’t winning because you’re dumb. It’s winning because it took the whole street, paid for the visibility, hired the guy outside, and made itself the path of least resistance for a tired person who just landed. That’s a logistics problem, not a taste problem.
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Stop asking the wrong people where to eat
Your friend who visited that city in 2019 is not a local source. The group chat is not a local source. Even your foodie cousin is mostly telling you about one neighborhood at one hour with one budget. Asking the wrong people is how you end up eating overpriced pasta in a square again.
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How place context beats star ratings
A 4.6 doesn’t tell you whether the kitchen is open right now, whether the regulars are actually here, or whether the place across the street is the real one. Stars average strangers. Context tells you what’s alive on the block at the hour you’re standing on it.
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Markets are the cheat code
The famous market is usually the wrong market. The boring one in a residential neighborhood, where someone is buying an actual onion, is where the city actually eats — from Bar Pinotxo at the back of La Boqueria to the ground floor of Mercato Centrale in Florence.
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How to read a city in one breakfast
Lunch is the city’s working face. Dinner is the costume. Breakfast is the city in pajamas, and that is exactly when you want to look. Skip the hotel, walk three blocks, order whatever the regulars are ordering, drink it standing up.
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Why I stopped trusting Instagram restaurants
Some kitchens survive virality — Bar Pinotxo, Le Bistrot Paul Bert, Da Cesare al Casaletto. Most don’t. The queue becomes the product, the dish becomes a prop, and what you came for quietly leaves the building.
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The case for eating alone
The bar seat is the best seat in most restaurants in the world. Faster food, a view of the kitchen, a smaller bill, and you get to leave when you want. The people who refuse to take it are leaving the most interesting half of the meal on the table.
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How Bwendi helped us model this thing
A short, honest account of building HungryButNotStupid with the team at Bwendi.com — what they pushed back on, what they took out, and why the product feels like a tool instead of an app.
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i.
Read the kitchen
If you can see hands moving, char on the grill, and steam from real pans, the food signal is alive. Watch the kitchen, not the marketing.
ii.
Read the menu
A handwritten daily menu, rewritten today, says someone is cooking what is in season and in the building. Laminated multi-language menus say the opposite.
iii.
Read the room
Who is at the counter? If it is regulars at a quiet hour, the place earns trust. If it is a host hustling tourists outside, the place is performing.
iv.
Read the hour
Some neighborhoods only make sense at very specific times. An empty room at peak hour is a warning. A packed terrace at the right hour is the cleanest signal there is.
v.
Read the bill
An honest, transparent bill at a fair local price is part of the trust. When the math lines up, you remember the place.
