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Steve Smith: Recommended Travel Guide for Travel, Food and Wine Writing Classes

One of my favorite places to run Travel, Food and Wine Writing Classes is France, one of the most geographically varied countries in the world, with everything from towering alpine peaks like Mont Blanc, sybaritic beaches of the Riviera, and wide swaths of rolling hills covered with vineyards in places like Bordeaux and Burgundy.

Steve Smith,  coauthor with Rick Steves of the Rick Steves France guide, is arguably one of the most knowledgeable experts on the country, one of the reasons I recommend his books to the students in my Travel, Food and Wine Writing Classes.

Smith is an avid Francophile, having visited Europe early on with his family. His father was an English professor and went to France to teach in the Fulbright program. Smith so enjoyed his time in Europe that he eventually went to work for Rick Steves, who at the time was just launching his tours to Europe.

Smith has now worked 24 years with Rick Steves, finding all the best hotels, restaurants, and sights in the amazingly diverse country.

“We’re covering fewer destinations in the country, but in more detail,” he said of the current approach to the guides. “We’re very diligent about checking destinations. We want the guides to bring things to people–restaurant and hotels, and local guides.”

My parents, Nicholas and Marie O’Connell, did several trips to Europe with Smith and enjoyed the trips immensely. My father, who reads widely, engaged in long and spirited conversations with Smith about Europe’s history and culture. Smith’s familiarity with this is evident throughout his guides, which include valuable, up-to-date service info on hotels, restaurants, and sights as well as informed discussions of  the culture of the place.

“We can always work harder to improve and describe the place and what people can take away from it,” he said.

Smith has what many travelers would consider an ideal job, traveling to Europe regularly with his wife and family, leading tours, and researching guidebooks. He now owns a home in France where he can relax between tours and work on updating the guidebooks. “I can write upstairs in the house,” he said, “looking out over the Burgundy canal.” No wonder the guidebooks are inspiring.

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Rick Steves Is Travel’s True Everyman

A Q&A with — and general appreciation of — the travel expert and author of the new book, “Italy for Food Lovers,” which focuses on traveling with eating in mind

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There are two parts in the introduction of Rick Steves’s new book, Italy for Food Lovers , that nearly made me cry. The first is Steves opining on the whole point of travel, the thing he’s dedicated his life to for the past four decades. “Globetrotting destroys ethnocentricity and helps us understand and appreciate other cultures,” he writes. “Rather than fear the diversity on this planet, celebrate it. Among your most prized souvenirs will be the strands of different cultures you choose to knit into your own character.”

The other is from his co-author, Fred Plotkin, on being a “pleasure activist.” This is the act, he describes, of using one’s senses, especially taste, without analyzing what is happening in that moment, so that we may more actively take in everything we experience. “It would be too pat to say that the fullest use of our senses is the secret to happiness,” he says. “But any behavior that can contribute to our becoming more fully human and insightful is to be prized. That, to me, is pleasure activism.”

I did not expect to be so moved by a travel guide, especially one spearheaded by a white man my parents’ age who describes himself as the “everyman” of travel. But then again, Rick Steves’s whole deal for the past four decades has been to convince Americans, through his guides, tours, and PBS show, that travel is both possible and necessary. Together these points articulated why travel, and specifically traveling to eat, has felt so important to me. It is not about mere consumption, whether of plates of food or a checklist of monuments, though that is what capitalism so often tries to reduce it to. It is about developing new instincts based on new experiences, challenging your perceptions of the world, and feeling yourself as a small part of a glorious whole.

It’s also, of course, about eating the best cheese or pesto or tortellini in brodo you’ve ever had in your life. There is a reason Steves’s first travel guide to focus on food takes place in Italy. Where else can one so easily devote their life to food? Over 450 pages, Steves and Plotkin expound the ins and outs of the cuisines of Italy. There are quick vocabulary lessons in pasta sauces, explanations of produce seasons and wine trails, and a guide to where to go and what to eat across the country, broken down into 20 different regions. “It’s a dangerous thing to page through this book,” says Steves, “because you get really hungry and you want figure out a way to get to Italy as soon as possible.”

Over the decades Steves has been in the game, he has watched as food has become a more important consideration for many travelers. And as someone who says he was happy eating his college dorm food long after he graduated, he admits one of the greatest things travel can do is expand one’s palate. We spoke to Steves about writing a food-focused guide, how travel priorities have changed, and how a good meal is as important an experience as seeing the Sistine Chapel.

Eater: It seems more that people are making food a real priority when they travel. Has that changed the way you structure your guides and trips?

Rick Steves: I wrote my first book in 1980, and I’ve been writing books ever since. In the old days, my best-selling book was The Best of Europe . The best-selling rail pass was the Eurail pass. Now relatively few people buy The Best of Europe book and relatively few people buy the Eurail pass, they buy the France rail pass or the Britain rail pass or the Spain and Portugal pass. So as we’ve become better-traveled and sophisticated in our travel planning, we go with more focus.

Thoughtful travelers have a list of experiences they want to have. I sell my tours not by how many things you can check off on your bucket list, but how many experiences are you going to help people have? And a big part of the experience for so many of us is eating well. Over 40 years, I think my tour members have taught me a lot about the appreciation of good food and wine in my travels. And I was a little late to the table, but now I’m as enthusiastic as anybody.

Am I the kind of traveler that would travel to another city just for a particular restaurant? No. Fred [Plotkin] would. But when I am in a town anywhere in Italy, I really realize that the stakes are high as far as my overall experience goes according to what restaurant I choose to eat at tonight. And more and more, me and my everyman approach to things will, say, make a reservation in advance for a good restaurant because if it’s a good restaurant, it’s a good chance you can’t get in it without a reservation. Treat it like going to the Uffizi Gallery, or the Vatican Museum. Part of the reason you’re going to this city is to have a great meal.

Ten, 15 years ago, I don’t really think they had many food tours, but now every city has a food tour, and that’s because if there’s a need with capitalism, somebody will fill it. And I just love giving somebody a hundred bucks, and then they take four hours to show me and a handful of other American tourists a bunch of little artisan shops where they serve wonderful, wonderful little slices of that local cuisine. It’s a mobile lunch, it’s an education, it’s entertaining. I just think it’s a great experience.

You mention in the introduction that Italy for Food Lover s is a reincarnation of Fred Plotkin’s Italy for the Gourmet Traveler from 1996. Do you remember reading that book for the first time?

I interviewed Fred about that book on my radio show and I was inspired. I just thought, “Ah, this book has got to get out to more people.” Fred and I both love Italy, and I thought we could merge our philosophies about eating your way through Italy, and it could be a real practical joy for travelers going to Italy for whom the stakes are high. You go to Italy for your first time, you don’t speak Italian — it’s a challenge to not be overwhelmed by the cuisine and culture. You should celebrate it and get out of your comfort zone. And that’s what Fred and I both wanted to help people do.

What makes yours and Fred’s philosophies about eating different?

For Fred, a great way to understand Italian culture is at the dinner table. In the same way, I’m really enthusiastic about understanding Italian culture through the museums, and the galleries, and the architecture, the history. There’s many ways to get into a culture, and Fred knows how to do it from a cuisine point of view.

I love to eat in Italy, but I don’t speak the language, and I’m sort of an everyman generalist. And I went back to the dorm for several years after I graduated from college just to get a good meal — I’m pretty simple that way. After spending so much time in Italy, I’m realizing it really behooves the traveler to be thoughtful about their approach to Italian food.

I’ve got a hundred people that work with me here in Seattle at Rick Steves’ Europe. We’ve got experience with taking Americans around Europe, we take 30,000 people a year on 1,200 different tours around Europe. Our most popular destination is Italy. My best-selling guidebook is the Italy book. And so Fred knows all about the food and the wine, and we know what are the frustrations and the challenges of travelers, and where are they going to go, and what are the practical and realistic pitfalls and opportunities that await them.

What did you learn about Italy and Italian food through writing this? Has it changed the way you’re going to travel in Italy?

I’ve always been charmed by what I call a good marriage of flavors. And Fred would go, “Oh yeah, that’s abbinamento.” So he knows there’s a word, abbinamento, for matching flavors and textures. And that’s why the traveler who doesn’t know the word abbinamento does know that cantaloupe with a thin slice of salty prosciutto around it is an amazing little dish.

I always like to say a good traveler can go to a good restaurant and look at the menu and know where they are and what month it is by what’s being served. They will eat the local specialties and they will eat them in season. That is so fundamental, that tip right there, and that will be a big benefit to you if you’re traveling anywhere in Italy. Too many Americans, they go to Italy and they’re hell-bent on porcini mushrooms. You can’t have good porcini mushrooms out of season. That’s something I’ve appreciated and I’ve been teaching for years. But Fred knows exactly where and how that shows itself. So that’s the great thing.

Italians are very famously opinionated about their food and where it comes from, and I’m curious if in researching this you ran into anyone disagreeing with how you’re classifying Italian food?

All over Europe there are fine points about culture. I mean, if you go to a Belgian bar and you order a particular beer, if they don’t have the proper glass for that beer, they’ll apologetically come back to you and say, “I’m sorry, we don’t have the proper glass. Would you still like that beer in this glass?” And I would say, “Come on, get over it. Just put it in the glass, I want to drink it.”

Most of our travelers, they don’t have the money, they don’t have the time, and they don’t have the language skills that Fred has, but we want to be practical and help our travelers know the pitfalls and the opportunities. As far as eating the wrong pasta in the wrong region or the wrong way, Fred would be more inclined to say, “What is the right way rather than the wrong way?” If you want to have red wine with your fish, it’s kind of up to you. You’re not going to go to jail for it. But I think Fred would say, “Traditionally in Sicily, they have their arancini this way, and in Naples, they have their pizza that way.” And that’s just fun to know because I pride myself in being a cultural chameleon. I cross borders whether they are national or regional with celebrations. As soon as I get into another region, I’m in Umbria, now, this is wild boar country. I’m in Liguria, this is pesto country. I’m in Tuscany, this is Chianina beef country. It doesn’t mean the beef’s not good in the next county, but it’s just part of the culture.

Are you planning to give the food treatment to any other country?

No. So many things that I do are depending on meeting the person I want to collaborate with. I’ve got a Turkey tour program because I met the most amazing guide in Turkey whose mission was the same as mine, to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando. I was not a big enthusiast about France for years, and I met a great traveler and a good friend of mine now, Steve Smith, and he was my co-author for all things French. I can handle my own in Italy because I’ve loved it and know it quite well for my needs as a travel writer and a tour guide, but I wouldn’t have had the balls to write a cuisine book about Italy had I not met Fred Plotkin. Your wheels start spinning and you just think, “Fred, let’s get our brains together here and let’s write the ultimate guide to help travelers, intermediate eaters, pleasure activists.”

I loved that phrase, “pleasure activist.”

I’m an intermediate eater, and Fred’s a pleasure activist, and together we wrote Italy for Food Lovers . Would I do the same thing for another country? Conceivably I would do one for France, but I would need to meet the Fred Plotkin of French cuisine. It’s just been such a delight to take his information and weave it into our very practical and fun-loving and down-to-earth approach to traveling in Italy, and to know that they’re going to eat better thanks to the hard work that Fred and I and my staff did for this book.

In all your research in Italy, what was your favorite thing that you’ve ever eaten there?

When I’m researching, it’s just get out of my way. I’m just like a tornado going through town ‘cause I got to check all the information. And there’s this prime time for researching restaurants because you’ve got to see them when they’re full. If you go at 7:30, a restaurant may be full of tourists, but if you go at 9:30, it’s going to be full of locals. That’s where you get the real energy.

And then just when I think things are shutting down and my work is done, I get on the phone and I call back the restaurant I was so intrigued by that I visited that evening and I say, “Can you serve me just a quick dinner? Just bring me whatever you want me to eat.” And they know what I’m doing in my work, and they know I want a sampling of all the good stuff, and what’s seasonal and what’s local, and what the chef wants me to have. And I sit down, my work’s done, and I just enjoy whatever the chef brings me. For me, that is really a delight. Let the chef bring you whatever he or she would like you to eat, and then be that cultural chameleon. Get out of your comfort zone, wash it down with some great wine, and just create a memory that you will savor for the rest of your life.

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Travel guidebooks aren’t dead, but they’ll never be the same. Maybe that’s a good thing.

This story has been updated.

Rick Steves is hyped. That’s not so unusual: Infectious joy is surely one key to Steves’s success as America’s kindly vacation guru. Still, when he leaves next month on a 40-day trip to update his European guidebooks — a ritual he used to perform each spring — it will be the first such journey since covid-19 erased his travel calendar, which explains his current level of euphoria.

“Just to get back in the saddle has got me so filled with adventure, with energy,” he said. “I can hardly wait.” The trip follows a pandemic-long dry spell that quieted presses across the guidebook industry. U.S. travel book sales in 2020 were down about 40 percent from the previous year, according to NPD BookScan. (The category includes, but doesn’t single out, travel guidebooks.)

Facing stalled sales and the prospect of ongoing upheaval amid the pandemic, many guidebook print runs were postponed or canceled. “We put all the guidebooks on pause,” said Pauline Frommer, co-president of the guidebook company her father, Arthur Frommer, founded in 1957. “It was very clear from the beginning of the pandemic that things were going to change drastically, and I did not want to print guidebooks that were not worth the paper they were printed on.”

The books were re-researched in 2021. Some have already been released, with more due out in the coming months.

The pandemic knockdown came following uncertain decades for the guidebook industry. After reaching 19,005,029 in 2006, U.S. travel book sales halved over the next decade. In 2013, BBC Worldwide sold Lonely Planet, a move followed by massive layoffs . Then, having acquired Frommer’s, Google quietly stopped all production of Frommer’s print guidebooks. (The Frommers acquired rights and resumed printing them.)

While everyone else is decluttering, I’m keeping the books that made me a traveler

That’s how 2013 became the year of essays trumpeting the demise of travel guidebooks, each attributing cause of death to some combination of apps, influencers, online searches and digital powerhouse Tripadvisor . But the doomsaying was nothing new. “The whole time I’ve been working on guidebooks, people have been like, ‘The end of guidebooks is nigh,’ ” said author Zora O’Neill, who wrote her first travel guidebook in 2002 and has penned titles for both Moon and Lonely Planet.

Although the end never came, O’Neill saw the industry change. Rates have fallen or stagnated in the past two decades, while in many cases, work-for-hire arrangements replaced traditional royalty contracts. And the once-dominant role of guidebooks in travel culture changed, too.

As an old millennial who started traveling in guidebooks’ supposedly halcyon age, I’ve watched that transformation with interest. Sometimes with nostalgia, too: I miss swapping annotated, dog-eared books with fellow travelers in bars or hostels. Now, you can reliably find those same places filled with people glued to their screens.

Twenty years ago, however, I would have said guidebooks contributed to an informational monoculture I found aggravating. I noticed that people using the same brand of travel guides seemed to follow each other, slightly abashed, from place to place.

On one months-long trip through Central America in 2002, fellow owners of Lonely Planet’s hefty “Central America on a Shoestring” became familiar faces as we popped up at the same places in city after city. When new businesses opened, owners struggled to get the word out. Lurid tales of questionable guidebook ethics circulated. Outdated or incorrect entries in a book could leave you stranded, but few other sources existed.

“When I started writing, the problem was that there was not enough information,” said Steves, noting that, at one time, guidebooks were almost the only way to decide where to stay in an unfamiliar city. As times changed, that sameness gave way to the untamed, thrilling diversity of today’s digital wilderness.

Sales of camping, hiking guides rise as Americans take to the outdoors

“It got to the point where there was too much information,” he said, noting that proliferating sources made it harder to know what was reliable. Researching a trip online can be a Mad Max infinity loop of unvetted user-generated reviews and self-appointed experts. Trading free trips for sunny features is common practice in the world of travel influencers, with little transparency about who is footing the bill for a given blog post or YouTube video.

While earlier travelers just needed some basic info, Steves said, guidebooks’ main value proposition might now be an escape hatch from that digital overwhelm. “Part of my job is to curate all the options — the glut of information — with a consistent set of values,” he said. What’s more, a print guidebook offers a chance to unplug, allowing travelers to put down their phones, Steves noted. With a screen close at hand, it’s too easy to let your attention drift away from that chic Parisian bistro and into drearily quotidian scrolling.

It seems to be working out, because Steves’s 2019 royalty checks were the highest of his career. Despite apocalyptic warnings, in fact, guidebooks are generally doing okay. After the rocky industry news of 2013, travel book sales stabilized, then stayed roughly even until the pandemic hit.

Most travelers who still buy print books, though, now seem to read them in conjunction with, not instead of, online resources. In recent Facebook and Twitter posts, veteran traveler and content creator Abigail King queried followers about how they use guidebooks today, noticing some buy for pre-trip research, reverting to the Internet for facts on the ground. Others turn books into a kind of souvenir stuffed with ticket stubs and handwritten notes.

“I use them in a really different way now, too, mainly for reading about the country and planning an itinerary,” said King, who lives in the United Kingdom. She noted that, when traveling to destinations in Europe with consistent cell coverage, she’s unlikely to bring a hard copy along.

“Guidebooks are now among a suite of tools people use,” said Grace Fujimoto, acquisitions director at Avalon Travel , which oversees the Moon Travel Guides imprint that is the United States’ top guidebook seller. (Disclosure: I’ve written several Moon guidebooks.) Fujimoto said the pandemic accelerated that shift toward book-plus-digital, partly because information has changed so quickly in the past two years.

But it just underscores a broader trend of recent years, she said. “Guidebooks are becoming more and more inspirational, in addition to just being repositories of information,” Fujimoto said, offering a forthcoming guidebook to Spain’s Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail as an example. “It does have a lot of good practical information, but it combines it with ways of appreciating what you’re seeing and doing almost every step of the way,” she said.

Lonely Planet is another publisher leaning into the shift. “Guidebooks are evolving into this experiential, curated collection,” said Lonely Planet spokesman Chris Zeiher. This month, the company released a new line of photo-heavy “Experience” guides, which Zeiher said are designed to inspire.

The first titles in the series, guidebooks to Italy, Portugal, Japan, Ireland, Scotland and Iceland, are noticeably lacking in the old-style comprehensive listings of hotels and restaurants. In their place are expert interviews and short, magazine-style features on the kinds of experiences travelers might build a trip around.

Flip through these to get fired up for chasing waterfalls in Iceland, for instance, or to dream up an itinerary focused on visiting Japanese temples. And unlike the earliest Lonely Planet guides, which were oriented to longer, more comprehensive trips, these are tailored to the shorter vacations increasingly common among travelers from the United States.

Zeiher, too, heard predictions of print guidebooks’ demise since he joined Lonely Planet nearly 17 years ago. But he’s optimistic about the coming decade. “One thing that Lonely Planet’s always done, is we’ve always evolved,” he said. “I think we’ll continue to do that.”

As the pandemic recedes and travelers return to the world, he’s betting there’s room in their bags for a book.

Smith is a writer based in Vermont. Her website is jenrosesmith.com . Find her on Twitter and Instagram : @jenrosesmithvt.

PLEASE NOTE

Potential travelers should take local and national public health directives regarding the pandemic into consideration before planning any trips. Travel health notice information can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s interactive map showing travel recommendations by destination and the CDC’s travel health notice webpage .

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Rick Steves Best of France (Rick Steves Travel Guide) Paperback – October 15, 2019

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• Strategic advice from Rick Steves on what's worth your time and money
• Short itineraries covering the best of Paris, Normandy, the Loire, Dordogne, Provence, the French Riviera, and Burgundy, including Versailles, Nice, the D-Day beaches, Côtes du Rhône, Monaco, Avignon, and more
• Rick's tips for beating the crowds, skipping lines, and avoiding tourist traps
• The best of local culture, flavors, and haunts, including insightful walks through museums, historic sights, and atmospheric neighborhoods
• Trip planning strategies like how to link destinations and design your itinerary, what to pack, where to stay, and how to get around
• Over 400 full-color pages with detailed maps and vibrant photos throughout
• Suggestions for side trips and excursions
• Print length 465 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Rick Steves
• Publication date October 15, 2019
• Dimensions 5.15 x 0.9 x 8.05 inches
• ISBN-10 1641711094
• ISBN-13 978-1641711098
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rick Steves; 3rd edition (October 15, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 465 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1641711094
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1641711098
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 0.9 x 8.05 inches
• #123 in Travel Dining Reference
• #237 in General France Travel Guides
• #791 in Tourist Destinations & Museums Guides

About the author

Rick steves.

Guidebook author and travel TV host Rick Steves is America's most respected authority on European travel. Rick took his first trip to Europe in 1969, visiting piano factories with his father, a piano importer. As an 18-year-old, Rick began traveling on his own, funding his trips by teaching piano lessons. In 1976, he started his business, Rick Steves' Europe, which has grown from a one-man operation to a company with a staff of 100 full-time, well-travelled employees at his headquarters in Washington state. There he produces more than 50 guidebooks on European travel, America's most popular travel series on public television, a weekly hour-long national public radio show, a weekly syndicated column, and free travel information available through his travel center and ricksteves.com. Rick Steves' Europe also runs a successful European tour program. Rick Steves lives and works in his hometown of Edmonds, Washington. His office window overlooks his old junior high school.

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