Netherlands

Start where the locals do: at a fish cart on a canal bridge, tipping your head back to lower a whole haring — raw, silvered, faintly sweet — by the tail, or if that's a leap too far, chopped with raw onion and pickle and speared with a little flag. It's a two-euro rite of passage, eaten standing up in the wind, and once you've done it the rest of the country opens up.

The Dutch table is honest and companionable: a wheel of nutty aged Gouda, a paper cone of twice-fried patat under a fat swirl of mayonnaise, a plate of molten bitterballen to go with a beer in a brown-wood café as the afternoon slides into evening. And thanks to three centuries of trade with the Indonesian archipelago, half the country's appetite is a rijsttafel — a table crowded with a dozen small spiced dishes — finished with a warm stroopwafel, its caramel oozing, handed to you fresh off the iron.