3 Chef-Selected Road Trips to Tantalize Your Taste Buds

She recommends a number of places between Sedona and Albuquerque, New Mexico, to take in the culture of the region, including El Malpais National Monument. “It’s like a little treasure that no one knows about, but once you go, you want to go again. … Puebloan cultures and their ties to the land are still evident today in places like the Zuni-Acoma Trail,” she says. She recommends packing a lunch and enjoying it here, then stopping in Winslow, Arizona, at La Posada for its expansive gardens and art collection.

“For me, a road trip is packing up my favorite noshable bites and enjoying the scenic views and stops along the way,” she says. Some of those favorite bites include items from her own restaurants, such as the Mediterranean sampler platter from Pisa Lisa in the Village of Oak Creek, or the quinoa confetti salad with grilled chicken, avocado and mango relish at Butterfly Burger.

Once in Santa Fe, Dahl and her husband, Scott, enjoy meals at Geronimo, where they have been dining for 25 years. They also enjoy La Boca, a tapas bar with fresh local ingredients like lamb meatballs with a roasted red pepper tomato sauce, and Radish & Rye for its extensive grilled meats menu and bar that specializes in impressive bourbons and ryes.

“Choose road trips that have great scenery, and your destinations should be places with some type of spiritual familiarity – places that call you back over and over. The more you travel to these types of familiar places, the more you get a sense of the deeper culture and community,” she adds.

For Kevin Belton, his trip from New Orleans to Lafayette, Louisiana, includes stops for fresh baked pastries, seafood and crawfish boudin.

Courtesy Monica Belton

Chef Kevin Belton

TV personality and cooking instructor, New Orleans

Chef Kevin Belton’s food-fueled road trip starts in his hometown of New Orleans and ends in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he visits his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Though the direct route takes about 2.5 hours, he prefers spending five to six hours driving through the heart of Bayou Country at a slower pace on U.S. Highway 90. “There is something that is a relaxing beauty about the Louisiana swamps,” he says.

His connection to the region’s culinary legacy started with his childhood. “In Louisiana, the center of all activity in the home is the kitchen,” Belton, 64, says. “As soon as you were old enough to sit in a chair, you [got] up to work, peeling shrimp, pulling grapes off the stems, and picking fruit berries.”

Today, he has spent almost 30 years leading cooking demonstrations and lessons on his favorite dishes, and is resident chef and reporter for the morning news program on WWL-TV, the CBS affiliate, in New Orleans. He also will be creating Louisiana-inspired dishes on next year’s Big Easy Cruise. In 2014, he was named one of the top 20 Louisiana chefs by the American Culinary Federation.

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Belton says for his road trip, he starts with a stop at a French bakery in New Orleans called Celtica for fresh baked pastries and bread. Once he crosses the Mississippi River, he picks up fresh seafood from Westwego Fisheries & Farmers Market to cook for dinner, then he’s on to Spahr’s Seafood in Des Allemands for what he calls “some of the best catfish to ever cross your lips.” At Legnon’s Boucherie in New Iberia, he picks up some crawfish boudin – a mixture of Cajun spices, crawfish and cooked rice – before eventually making it to his son’s for dinner.