Savor Scout › What to eat › What to eat when you're hungover
What to eat
What to eat when you're hungover
A hangover does not make you hungry so much as it makes you suggestible. Anything anyone names out loud starts to sound correct, which is why the group chat produces eleven ideas and nobody moves for an hour.
The received wisdom is that you want grease. Sometimes you do. But the more reliable pattern is that you want three things at once — salt, liquid and something warm — and the reason a bacon sandwich has a reputation is that it delivers two of them while a bowl of pho delivers all three.
The other constraint nobody mentions is effort. Hungover you will not park in a structure, will not wait forty minutes, and will abandon the plan entirely if the first place has a queue down the block. The best hangover restaurant is not the best restaurant. It is the good-enough one that is close, open, and fast.
What separates a good hangover meal from a bad one:
- Broth, or something that drinks like it — Pho, ramen, congee, menudo, tortilla soup, matzo ball soup. Hot salty liquid is the single most reliable category, and every food culture has a version of it for exactly this reason.
- Salt you can taste — Under-seasoned food is genuinely unpleasant in this state. A place known for being delicate is the wrong call today.
- Egg availability — Not because eggs are magic, but because a kitchen that will put a fried egg on anything gives you a way to make a dish heavier without ordering a second one.
- Open now, close by, no wait — Weight this far higher than you normally would. A 4.7 twenty-five minutes away loses to a 4.2 that is four minutes away.
- Refills — Somewhere that keeps filling the glass without being asked is worth more this morning than the food is.
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 “hot salty soup, close by, open now” 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
The two classic errors are ordering for the person you were last night — a giant plate you will look at once and push away — and going somewhere fashionable, where brunch means a ninety-minute wait in direct sunlight. Also: anything that arrives on a wooden board.
What to eat
Worth considering here: pho, ramen, soup, breakfast, tacos, burgers.