10 Late-Night Eats Around the World I’d Travel Back For

There are certain foods that just taste better after dark. Not because they’re particularly sophisticated. Usually the opposite.

I’m talking about the food eaten standing under fluorescent lights at one in the morning. Food handed through windows by men whose names you never learn. Food eaten drunk, exhausted, lost, sunburnt, heartbroken or some combination of the above.

I’ve eaten in good restaurants while travelling. I’ve deliberately sought out famous dishes and places people insist you have to visit. Yet some of the meals I remember most clearly are the ones I never planned to eat at all: a kebab after a nightclub in Berlin, pizza with strangers in Naples, fried rice because I was starving after diving in Indonesia, or an enormous Serbian meat sandwich handed to me by a man who trusted a drunk Englishman to disappear into Belgrade looking for a cash machine and actually come back.

None of these are necessarily the best versions of these dishes. I’m not even sure I could find some of the places again. But that’s sort of the point.

These are ten late-night meals I’d travel back for.

1. London, England — Chicken and Chips

Before travelling around the world looking for food, there was Global Kebab.

It was an independent takeaway where I grew up in London, run by my original bossman, Duran. Global Kebab is gone now. Duran too, presumably having moved on to whatever comes after spending years feeding generations of hungry Londoners. But the place remains part of my understanding of home.

Ask somebody about Britain’s great takeaway tradition and they’ll probably start talking about fish and chips. Maybe that was true once. It wasn’t particularly true for me. We had chicken and chips: fried chicken straight from the warmer, chips buried under enough salt to shorten your life expectancy, chilli sauce applied with complete disregard for the structural integrity of the roof of your mouth. Cheap, greasy and absolutely everywhere.

The chicken shop became part of the landscape of London neighbourhoods like mine. It was somewhere you went after school, after the pub, with your mates or simply because you had a few quid in your pocket and were hungry. There are restaurants where you’re supposed to appreciate the provenance of every ingredient. Nobody has ever asked about the provenance of a chicken leg at midnight in a London takeaway. That’s not the transaction.

The transaction is chicken, chips, chilli sauce and change from whatever increasingly unreasonable amount London now expects you to pay for it.

Global Kebab may have disappeared, but whenever I’m back in London there’s a respectable substitute: Morley’s. It will never quite be Duran’s, but it’ll do.

2. Dublin, Ireland — The Spice Bag

Dublin, 2019. Britain was tearing itself apart over Brexit and I was in Ireland doing what British people have historically done remarkably well: arriving somewhere else and talking about Britain. At least this time there was some self-awareness involved.

I spent an evening talking about Brexit, Britain’s relationship with Ireland and the strange reality that the consequences of leaving the European Union were perhaps nowhere more tangible than around Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland — the UK’s only land border with an EU member state. This was still 2019, before the UK formally left the EU, but by then Brexit had consumed British politics and I had plenty of remorse about the direction we were heading in.

Eventually, politics gave way to hunger.

I couldn’t tell you where the takeaway was. I couldn’t lead you back there and I don’t remember its name. I remember the spice bag.

The concept sounds like somebody emptied the contents of a Chinese takeaway onto a table and decided plates were unnecessary: chips, crispy chicken, peppers, onions, chilli, salt and spices, all thrown together in a bag.

The spice bag is a relatively young product of Ireland’s Chinese takeaway culture rather than something handed down from an ancient culinary tradition. That’s precisely what makes it interesting. People migrate. Food migrates with them. Then the new place gets involved. Eventually you end up with something that isn’t entirely Chinese and isn’t traditionally Irish but is unquestionably Irish.

There is probably a serious essay to be written about migration, national identity and cultural exchange through the medium of fried chicken and chips. At that particular moment, though, I just wanted to eat it.

After an evening contemplating Britain’s increasingly complicated relationship with its closest neighbour, an Irish-Chinese bag of fried carbohydrates felt oddly appropriate.

3. Ghent, Belgium — Beef Stew, Frites and Mayo

2 January 2023. Europe was hungover.

Christmas had happened. New Year’s Eve had happened. New Year’s Day had presumably been spent promising never to drink again, and now Ghent was attempting to return to normal. I joined a long queue containing locals and travellers who all appeared to be at various stages of recovering from the festive period.

Belgium understands this situation because Belgium has frites.

Not chips in quite the British sense. Belgian frites come with rules, technique and an almost unreasonable level of national pride: fried twice, crisp outside, fluffy inside, then served with a quantity of mayonnaise that would cause concern in most other countries.

Then there was the stoofvlees, beef slowly cooked until it falls apart into a dark, rich sauce, traditionally involving Belgian beer. This isn’t elegant food. It’s cold-weather food, drinking food, recovery food. It’s the sort of dish developed because people had inexpensive cuts of meat, beer and enough common sense to realise that combining the two and leaving them alone for several hours was unlikely to make matters worse.

Pour that over properly cooked frites and add mayonnaise and suddenly the queue makes sense.

Belgium has given the world extraordinary beer, chocolate and waffles. But on 2 January, surrounded by people collectively attempting to piece themselves back together after Christmas, give me the stew.

4. Berlin, Germany — Döner Kebab

Berlin, January 2019. I came stumbling out of a nightclub and into a taxi. The driver asked where I wanted to go, and I didn’t give him an address or the name of my hotel. I gave him the only destination that mattered: döner kebab.

To his credit, he understood the assignment.

We ended up around Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz at Luxa, where I was deposited in front of exactly what I’d asked for. This is one of the things Berlin does extraordinarily well.

The döner has Turkish roots, of course, but the sandwich most Europeans recognise — shaved meat packed into bread with salad and sauces — became part of Berlin through the city’s Turkish immigrant communities. Over time, immigrant food stopped being something separate from Berlin’s identity and became Berlin food.

There’s something important in that. Cities are constantly changing because the people living in them change. They arrive with languages, religions, music and food. The next generation grows up surrounded by all of it and eventually starts arguing over who makes the best version.

Britain has kebab shops everywhere, but eating a döner in Berlin feels different. Especially when you haven’t actually chosen the kebab shop yourself. You’ve simply told a Berlin taxi driver that you require meat rotating on a vertical spit and placed yourself entirely in his hands.

He chose well.

5. Vienna, Austria — Currywurst

November 2023, outside Karlsplatz station in Vienna. And yes, I know: currywurst is German.

Someone will inevitably object to putting it under Austria, and they’ll technically be correct. I just don’t particularly care, because this isn’t a list of where foods were invented. It’s a list of where I remember eating them.

Vienna has its own great tradition of Würstelstände, sausage stands dotted around the city where people can stand outside eating at hours when respectable dining rooms have already packed away their tablecloths. That’s where sausage belongs at night: outside, standing up.

Currywurst itself is generally associated with post-war Berlin: sausage chopped up and covered in a sauce involving ketchup and curry powder. It’s one of those dishes that sounds like it shouldn’t have required invention. Surely humanity had sausage. Humanity had ketchup. Humanity had curry powder. Somehow it still took until the twentieth century for somebody to put the three together and realise they’d created excellent drunk food.

Berlin can keep the historical claim. For me, Berlin already has the döner. Vienna gets the currywurst.

Food memories don’t care much for borders.

6. Gdańsk, Poland — Zapiekanka

September 2019. I was in Gdańsk with a girlfriend while the relationship was in the process of falling apart. I can’t remember where I bought the zapiekanka, and perhaps that’s fitting.

There are periods of your life where the details become blurry but certain completely inconsequential things remain inexplicably sharp. In my case: Polish cheese on toast.

Except calling zapiekanka cheese on toast is both technically accurate and deeply unfair. Take half a baguette, add mushrooms and cheese, toast the whole thing and cover it in sauce. The basic version is gloriously simple.

It became popular street food during Poland’s communist era, when ingredients and consumer goods weren’t exactly abundant. Cheap ingredients, simple preparation and something hot and filling. Necessity has produced a lot of good food.

Modern versions can have meat, vegetables, different cheeses, garlic sauce and almost anything else somebody can balance on half a baguette, but it doesn’t really need improving.

There I was in Gdańsk, relationship disintegrating around me, eating an absurdly long toasted baguette covered in melted cheese. I don’t remember the argument.

I remember the zapiekanka.

Make of that what you will.

7. Naples, Italy — Pizza

April 2022. Italy had reopened after COVID restrictions and I went almost immediately. Tourism hadn’t completely returned yet. In some places I seemed to be the only tourist around; elsewhere I was turned away because my British NHS vaccination evidence wasn’t accepted.

It was a strange period to travel. The world was open. Sort of.

Then I met some locals in a bar in Naples. After drinking together, they decided I needed pizza. Not tourist Naples pizza. Their pizza.

We disappeared into the lanes of the Spanish Quarter. At various points during this journey, I wasn’t entirely certain whether I was being taken for dinner or being robbed. This is generally a sign that you’re having an interesting evening.

Naples doesn’t merely make pizza. The city has spent generations turning an incredibly simple combination of dough, tomato and cheese into something approaching religion. The traditional version isn’t the rigid, overloaded disc sold by international chains. It’s soft, charred around the edges and the centre can be wet enough that eating it neatly becomes impossible.

Good. Some food shouldn’t be eaten neatly.

The locals knew exactly where they were going. I didn’t. That’s one of my favourite positions to be in while travelling.

You can spend hours researching the best restaurant in a city. Read reviews. Watch videos. Compare menus. Or you can meet somebody in a bar and follow them through streets where you’re increasingly convinced your kidneys may shortly be listed on the black market.

The pizza was excellent. I kept both kidneys.

Successful evening.

8. Seoul, South Korea — Korean Corn Dog

Seoul, July 2022. Tourists were only beginning to return in numbers after COVID, and I ended up drinking around Hongdae with a South African I’d met at a tourist attraction.

He was deeply into Korean culture. And K-pop. Very deeply. Imagine the K-pop equivalent of a weeb and you’re somewhere close.

This also meant he had taken responsibility for my Korean table manners. Apparently, I was a liability. My chopstick technique was questionable. Where I placed them could be wrong. Various things I did apparently had the potential to offend an entire nation. I had survived thirty years without considering chopstick placement a diplomatic issue. Now I had supervision.

After drinking in Hongdae, we found Korean corn dogs.

Calling these things corn dogs doesn’t adequately prepare you for what Korea has done to them. Sausage, mozzarella, batter, breadcrumbs, sometimes potato, then into the deep fryer. And then, because apparently restraint had already left the building, sugar.

They roll the thing in sugar.

The first time you encounter this, every instinct tells you somebody has made a mistake. Then you eat it and realise there was no mistake at all. Salty sausage, molten cheese, crisp batter, sugar and sauces somehow cooperate despite having absolutely no business doing so.

It’s excessive, cheap, portable and perfectly suited to Seoul after dark.

I probably held the chopsticks wrong afterwards.

9. Gili Trawangan, Indonesia — Nasi Goreng

August 2026. Warung Ika, just off the main strip on Gili Trawangan.

I’d spent the day diving and then considerably too much of the night drinking. By the time I was making my way around the island, hunger had progressed beyond wanting something particular. I needed food immediately, and I stopped at the warung.

Nasi goreng is almost aggressively straightforward when translated into English: fried rice. That doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but travel teaches you fairly quickly that some of the world’s best food descriptions are terrible advertisements for the actual dish.

Rice fried with garlic, shallots, chilli and kecap manis, the thick sweet soy sauce responsible for that dark, savoury sweetness. Add egg, chicken, prawns, vegetables, sambal — whatever is available. There isn’t one definitive nasi goreng because there isn’t one definitive Indonesian cuisine. Thousands of islands, hundreds of ethnic groups and countless regional variations make that impossible.

The version I needed that night didn’t require a culinary thesis. I’d been underwater for hours, I’d been drinking for considerably more, I was starving, there was a warung and they had fried rice.

This is sometimes all the context a great meal needs.

People can spend a fortune trying to manufacture memorable dining experiences. Sometimes you just need to be exhausted, slightly drunk and incredibly hungry on a small Indonesian island.

10. Belgrade, Serbia — Pljeskavica

And then there’s Belgrade.

I’d spent the night drinking honey rakija. At some point I’d also managed to invite myself onto a Russian stag do. I wasn’t Russian, I wasn’t getting married and I don’t recall anybody formally inviting me. These apparently weren’t insurmountable obstacles.

After a long night enjoying Serbian hospitality and Russian company, I eventually found myself wandering through Belgrade in the condition you’d expect from somebody who had spent several hours drinking fruit brandy with a stag party he wasn’t actually part of.

Then I saw a window. Behind it was a man selling food at Leskovac u malom.

I didn’t attempt Serbian, point at a menu or ask what he recommended. I simply said, “Food.”

The man looked at me and apparently decided he understood the situation. He gave me a pljeskavica.

I didn’t know that was what it was called at the time. To me, it was an enormous Serbian burger. Pljeskavica is seasoned minced meat shaped into a large patty and grilled, often served inside lepinja, the soft Balkan flatbread, with onions and various accompaniments.

It is magnificent drunk food.

There was one problem. He didn’t take card and I had no cash. So this man, who had just met an obviously drunk foreigner whose entire command of the Serbian language appeared to consist of saying the English word “food”, let me take the sandwich. He trusted me to walk to an ATM and come back.

So off I went through Belgrade carrying a pljeskavica roughly the size of my head.

By the time I reached the cash machine, I’d eaten it.

I withdrew the money and walked back to pay him.

I think about that meal more than I probably should. Not because it was the finest thing I’ve ever eaten. I couldn’t tell you what precise combination of meat was in the patty or give you tasting notes. At the time, I didn’t even know its name.

I remember it because of everything around it: the honey rakija, the Russian stag do I’d somehow adopted, the stranger behind the window, his willingness to trust me and the ridiculous realisation that I’d managed to finish the thing during the short walk to a cash machine.

The Meals You Don’t Plan

That’s why this list was never really about food.

You can research the best restaurants in a city before you arrive, save them on Google Maps, read a hundred reviews and reserve a table weeks in advance. Sometimes you should. But years later, the meal you remember might be the one you never planned.

For me, it’s a chicken shop that isn’t there anymore. A spice bag after talking about Brexit. Belgian stew surrounded by hungover strangers. A taxi driver choosing my kebab. Pizza with people I met in a bar. Fried rice because I’d spent the day underwater. A Serbian man taking one look at me, correctly determining that conversation was unnecessary, and handing me food.

Maybe that’s why late-night food tastes better. By that point in the evening, you’ve usually stopped looking for an experience.

And that’s when you find one.