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What to eat
What to eat when it's too hot to eat
Appetite drops in heat, and the default response is a salad, which is why so many hot-weather meals are unsatisfying. The problem is not that salad is bad. It is that cold and light are being treated as the same thing when they are not.
What actually works in heat is a combination of cold, sharp and salty. Acid is the key one — lime, vinegar, tamarind, yoghurt, pickles — because it cuts through a flattened appetite in a way that a plain cold plate does not. A som tam, a ceviche, a plate of cold noodles with vinegar, a gazpacho, a bowl of cold soba: all of these are refreshing in a way that a bowl of leaves is not.
It is also worth knowing that plenty of cultures in genuinely hot places eat hot, spicy food in the heat, and there is something to it: chilli makes you sweat, and sweating is how cooling works. A bowl of curry in July is less perverse than it sounds, provided the room has air conditioning.
The last piece is salt, which matters more in heat than at any other time and is the thing an undressed salad conspicuously lacks. That is most of why it leaves you unsatisfied.
What to order:
- Cold noodles — Soba, naengmyeon, bun cha, liangpi, cold sesame noodles. The best category in this weather by a distance.
- Sharp and acidic — Ceviche, som tam, larb, gazpacho, anything with lime or vinegar doing the work.
- Raw or barely cooked — Sashimi, crudo, poke, tartare. Light without being thin.
- Yoghurt-based dishes — Cold, salty and substantial. Raita, tzatziki, doogh, cacik.
- Or the opposite: hot and spicy, indoors — A legitimate strategy, and how much of the hot world actually eats.
Try this search
Savor Scout takes a sentence rather than a category, so the criteria above can go straight into the box. For this, something like “cold noodles or something sharp and citrusy” works — it reads menus and reviews for those specific things and comes back with one place and the reasons it picked it.
What usually goes wrong
Heavy cream, deep-fried anything, and an undressed salad. Also avoid outdoor seating you have been looking forward to all year — a table in direct sun at 1pm is not the experience it sounds like.
What to eat
Worth considering here: Vietnamese food, Korean food, Japanese food, Thai food, salads.