I’ve gone on holiday by accident more than once. About 6 years ago I ended up on a romantic long weekend in Milton Keynes. This was due to a geographical miscalculation. The highlight of trip was watching a rat fight a magpie for a snail. The magpie won. More glamorously, in May 2023 I took a 5-night solo trip to Atlanta, Georgia. I wasn’t visiting friends or relatives and the immigration person at Atlanta airport found this weird. I had originally planned the trip around going to see a band. A band I’ve seen perform an embarrassing number of times already, so this doesn’t make it any less weird. But when cancelled the show I decided to go anyway. This was partly because I hadn’t done any solo travel for a while and I had a bit of an itch. Partly because I’d never visited the US South and partly because I’d already arranged an interesting itinerary. This included a walking food tour.

I now try to build a walking food tour into every trip I take, as they are an excellent way to learn about a place and its history, and get a load of brilliant recommendations for where to eat the best food. Foodtoursatlanta combined delicious food by local, independent businesses, vibrant street art along the pedestrianised and verdant Beltline, a former railroad that encircles the city, and the 130-year history of Atlanta’s first suburb, Inman Park, whose iconic symbol is a black, yellow and blue butterfly. This was a bit spooky, as the band I had planned to see was then called Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum (now they are simply Princess Goes), so it was almost like I got to see them in the end. The coincidences carried on, as the tour guide was *delighted* to find out that I was a food historian from Leicester, one of the UK’s foremost hotspots for Indian street food, right when he was introducing the first tasting: pani puri, a crispy fried hollow sphere filled with spiced potato and served with fragrant tamarind water, at the Krog Street Market. The market was a great spot to start the tour, and I paid several return visits over subsequent days, to explore the craft beer, Sichuan, and Cuban outlets.

As we walked south along the Beltline and then east through the Inman Park neighbourhood, we sampled classic American fare – pizza, doughnuts, and buffalo wings – and reminded ourselves why these are classics. The spicy boiled peanuts accompanying our smoked wings were more interesting and challenging, courtesy of The Albert, a restaurant bar filled with intriguing artwork. Here, I learned about Atlanta’s famous wing-dressing – lemon pepper – and the battle between wet and dry versions. I haven’t seen the Donald Glover TV show “Atlanta”, which apparently brought news of this local speciality to a global audience, so I had to wait for tour guide Michael to fill me in. Lemon pepper seasoning is made of dried lemon zest (obviously), black pepper (well, duh), salt (of course), onion powder and garlic powder (okay, I needed to be told about those last two). I’ve seen recipes that include other spices like paprika or cumin, but I think they cloud the pepper flavour that should stand out. Lemon pepper dry is when the wings are coated and cooked in this seasoning; lemon pepper wet takes the added step of dousing the coated, cooked wings in butter and cooking them again. Since we didn’t actually try lemon pepper wings, wet or dry, on the food tour, I did what any reasonable person would do immediately after it finished and went to find some.

I felt a little bad about this, because in the previous three hours on the tour I’d eaten pani puri, an apple turnover, two types of pizza, a doughnut, smoked wings, boiled peanuts and ice-cream. So I sought validation via text message from an equally food-obsessed friend while I had a beer and pondered the wet vs dry dilemma. About two months later, I sat in that friend’s back garden conducting a taste test on the lemon pepper wet and dry wings that she had prepared in bulk. Listen, they’re both good, but dry won that round, hands down.