Eating Vegetarian and Vegan Around the World

There's a persistent belief that traveling vegetarian means a trip of side salads and apologetic omelettes. That was true a decade or two ago in a lot of places and it is emphatically not true now — but the picture is uneven, and knowing which countries are effortless and which require planning is the difference between eating brilliantly and eating grimly.

The countries where it's genuinely easy

India is the outstanding case: a large proportion of the population eats vegetarian, restaurants are routinely marked as such, and the vegetarian cooking is not a compromise version of anything — it's the main event.

Much of the Mediterranean is straightforward for different reasons: a cuisine built substantially on vegetables, pulses, bread and oil, where the vegetarian dishes were always there and simply weren't labeled. Buddhist temple cuisine across parts of East Asia is another, and a great many cities worldwide now have dedicated vegan scenes that would have been unimaginable not long ago.

Where the hidden ingredients live

The dishes that catch people out almost never look like meat dishes. They look like vegetables, and the animal product is in the foundation.

• Fish sauce and shrimp paste — base seasonings across much of Southeast Asia, present in a great many dishes that appear entirely plant-based.
• Meat stock — the default liquid in soups, noodle broths, risottos, and sauces almost everywhere.
• Lard and animal fats — the traditional cooking fat in a number of cuisines, including for things like refried beans and pastry.
• Gelatin — in desserts, sweets, and some drinks.
• Cheese made with animal rennet — relevant for strict vegetarians in classic cheese-producing regions.

Learn three phrases, not a vocabulary

The useful three are: I don't eat meat or fish, is there meat stock in this?, and cooked without butter if you're vegan. Written on a card, in the local language, checked by a person rather than only by an app.

The phrase that does the most work, though, is a positive one rather than a negative one: what vegetable dishes do you have? Asking what a kitchen can do produces enthusiasm and a real answer. Listing what you can't eat produces a defensive shrug and a plate of chips.

Go where vegetables are the point

Seek out the parts of a food culture that were always plant-based rather than asking for modifications to dishes that weren't. Every cuisine has them: the small dishes, the sides, the street snacks, the market stalls, the breakfast food, the temple food, the fasting-day dishes.

Markets are especially good, because you can see every ingredient and assemble a meal from stalls that were never going to involve meat in the first place.

The apps are genuinely good now

Crowd-sourced vegetarian and vegan restaurant directories cover most cities of any size and are maintained by people with the same requirements you have. Download the listings for your destination before you arrive, because you'll want them precisely when you have no signal.

Cross-check anything important against recent reviews rather than the listing itself — restaurants change, and a directory entry from three years ago is not evidence.

Plan the travel days

As with any dietary restriction, the difficult moments aren't at restaurants you chose. They're at airports, on long transit days, and in small towns at odd hours. Carrying enough to skip one meal removes essentially all of that pressure.

The bottom line

Most of the world is far easier than its reputation, provided you learn where the animal products hide rather than only which dishes obviously contain them. Ask what a kitchen can make instead of what you can't eat, seek out the parts of the cuisine that were always vegetable-based, and carry a properly translated card. Done that way, eating vegetarian abroad isn't a limitation on the trip — it routinely turns out to be the thing that pushes you into the food you'd otherwise have walked past.

This piece reflects our own research and testing, current as of publish. Details change — always confirm current specifics before you go. Some links above are affiliate links: we may earn a commission at no cost to you, which helps keep the hacks free.