Dawn Teo flew to Seoul last October chasing a table. Not a landmark, not a museum — a restaurant. Several, actually: the ones featured on Netflix’s Culinary Class Wars, the competition show that turned a handful of Korean chefs into travel itineraries overnight. Teo, chief operating officer of the Singapore-based hotel and restaurant developer Amara Holdings, told CNBC the reservations were impossible to get. She went anyway.
Luxury food tourism describes travel planned primarily around dining: reservations at Michelin-starred or internationally recognized restaurants, chef-led tasting menus, and culinary experiences that function as the main reason for a trip rather than an add-on to it. In 2026, it has become one of luxury travel’s fastest-growing, and most competitive, categories.
The Shift: Food Stopped Following the Itinerary and Started Writing It
For years, restaurants were what filled the gap between excursions. Now, for a growing share of travelers, the restaurant is the excursion. American Express Travel’s 2026 trend research found 72% of travelers rank food and nightlife as their top destination priority, ahead of entertainment and sports events. Virtuoso’s 2026 Luxe Report, drawn from more than 2,400 travel advisors worldwide, found food and drink are no longer just part of the journey. They’re often the reason a destination gets chosen in the first place.
That’s a real inversion. It used to be: pick the destination, then find somewhere good to eat. Increasingly it’s the reverse — pick the chef, then book the flight.
The Evidence: A Guide Turns 100, and a Show Rewires an Itinerary
Two things collided to make this the year Michelin became a travel keyword instead of a dining one.
First, the Michelin Guide marked its 100th anniversary and used it to keep expanding rather than resting on the old map. The guide now covers 28 editions across more than 25 countries. Saudi Arabia received its first-ever selection in December 2025: 52 restaurants across Riyadh, Jeddah, and AlUla, with star ratings arriving in the 2027 edition. “Saudi Arabia is fast becoming a culinary destination where tradition meets global creativity,” said Gwendal Poullennec, the Michelin Guide’s international director. It’s another way of saying the Guide now goes wherever the ambition is, not just where the old European canon already lived.
Second: television. Culinary Class Wars sent food tourism to Seoul into a documented spike, per CNBC reporting, with restaurants featured on the show becoming essentially unbookable, according to Teo.
Both stories point the same direction. A Michelin star, or a viral chef, now functions less like a rating and more like a landmark. Something to route a trip around.
What the Luxury Food Tourism Trend Looks Like on the Ground
Half of global travelers now book a restaurant reservation before they book a flight. One in five say they’ve built an entire trip around chasing a specific culinary experience. Farm-to-table cracked the top five sustainable travel priorities in Virtuoso’s 2026 report for the first time, evidence that the food-as-destination mindset isn’t only about trophy tables. It’s also about tracing a dish back to the ground it grew in.
Hotels have noticed. Concierge teams now treat a coveted reservation the way they used to treat opera tickets: the thing that makes or breaks a stay. Some properties have started hiring dedicated culinary concierges whose entire job is securing tables their guests couldn’t get alone.
The Meaning Pivot: What a Reservation Actually Buys
Here’s the part worth sitting with: a Michelin star was never really about the food. It was about the seat. Proof you knew someone, planned early enough, or mattered enough to get one.
But that’s starting to crack, even at the top. Heather Evans, a client experience director for a luxury tour operator, put it plainly: the new culinary status symbol isn’t the reservation anymore. It’s the intimacy of the setting. It’s the human connection behind the plate. The travelers who could get any table in the world are increasingly choosing dinner in a stranger’s home in Cambodia instead: a home-cooked meal, a chef they can actually talk to, a story that doesn’t come printed on a menu.
The table used to be the whole point. Now the table is just where the story starts.
It’s also worth saying, from a strictly vegetarian vantage point: fine dining’s tasting-menu culture has long treated vegetarian cooking as an afterthought, a mushroom course wedged between dishes built around meat and fish. That’s changing, slowly, as more Michelin-recognized kitchens design entire menus around vegetables rather than substituting around them. “Slowly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Who This Trend Doesn’t Serve
Worth naming plainly: this is a trend built on scarcity, and scarcity has a cost.
The same tightening that makes a reservation feel like a trophy also prices out the people who used to eat there without thinking twice: the regulars, the neighborhood, the local food culture the restaurant was built inside of. When a Seoul barbecue spot goes from neighborhood fixture to six-week waitlist because it appeared on a Netflix show, something is gained for tourism and something is lost for the city it belongs to.
It’s also worth naming that Michelin’s century of authority was built on a specific, largely European framework of what fine dining means, and its expansion into the Middle East and Asia is still catching up to cuisines and cooking traditions the guide didn’t originally have language for. A star is not a neutral measurement. It’s a set of values, applied unevenly, still being rewritten in real time.
And for travelers who would rather eat where the locals eat than compete for a table a magazine told them to want, this whole category can feel like status dressed up as taste.
What It Means
Dawn Teo got her table in Seoul. What she actually got, she would probably admit, wasn’t really the meal. It was proof she was willing to chase it, and a story to tell at the next dinner she hosts herself.
That’s the real product of this culinary tourism boom. Not the tasting menu. The chase, and what it says about the person willing to make it.
The most discerning travelers already know the difference. They’re the ones skipping the six-week waitlist for a home-cooked meal in a stranger’s kitchen, because eventually, everyone gets tired of eating for the story instead of the meal.
Table.
People Also Ask
What is luxury food tourism? Luxury food tourism is travel planned primarily around dining experiences, including Michelin-starred restaurants, chef-led tasting menus, and regional culinary traditions, where the meal is the primary reason for the trip rather than a supplement to it.
Why are Michelin stars important in travel planning? Michelin stars function as a globally recognized shorthand for dining credibility, which travelers increasingly use to plan entire itineraries and justify long-haul trips built around a single reservation.
What is the difference between food tourism and culinary tourism? The terms are largely interchangeable, though culinary tourism more often includes hands-on experiences like cooking classes, market tours, and chef meet-and-greets, while food tourism leans toward dining and restaurant-focused travel.
Which destinations are trending for luxury food tourism in 2026? Saudi Arabia, following its first Michelin Guide selection, Seoul, driven by renewed global interest in Korean cuisine, and established culinary capitals like Tokyo, Paris, and Lima continue to anchor luxury food travel itineraries in 2026.
Do luxury travelers still care about Michelin stars? Increasingly less as a final word. Many high-net-worth travelers now treat a Michelin star as a starting point rather than the goal, prioritizing intimate, chef-led, or home-hosted meals over trophy reservations.
How much of travel planning is now built around dining? American Express Travel’s 2026 research found 72% of travelers rank food and nightlife as a top priority when choosing a destination, and Virtuoso reports food and drink increasingly drive the choice of destination itself.
What is the Michelin Guide’s newest market? Saudi Arabia received its first-ever Michelin Guide selection in December 2025, covering 52 restaurants across Riyadh, Jeddah, and AlUla, with star ratings set to follow in the 2027 edition.
Is culinary tourism the same as food tourism? They overlap heavily. Culinary tourism generally emphasizes participation, such as cooking with a local chef, while food tourism is more focused on seeking out and dining at notable restaurants.
Related Reading on LHR
- What Luxury Travel Actually Means in 2026
- The Quiet Luxury Travel Trend, Explained
- Sleep Tourism: Luxury Travel’s Quietest Trend
Image Alt Text Suggestions
- Chef plating a tasting menu course at a Michelin-starred restaurant
- Diners at an intimate chef’s table experience during a luxury food tourism trip
- Exterior signage of a newly Michelin-recognized restaurant in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- Home-cooked meal shared with a local chef during a culinary travel experience
