Everyone needs to eat. On the road you have two choices. You could buy food in a grocery store and prepare it yourself or you can pay someone else to prepare your food. Either way you're essentially foraging for food. You cannot just go to the refrigerator and grab something or drive to your favorite restaurant. While on the move, you'll have to get food wherever you can. In the evening, unless you are staying in a regular hotel, there will not be a restaurant as part of the facility and you'll have to go somewhere else for food. This is probably just as well as most hotel restaurants are barely adequate and very expensive. In any case, you'll have to search out a place to eat.
Like everything I talk about in this web site, I will approach this subject with my own unique perspective. You may disagree but you need to understand my approach to food if you are going to decide how much weight to give to what I have to say.
I have two governing principles concerning food.
I know that most people think that my approach to food is a bit loony but that's the way it is. Take this into acount when reading what follows.
A surprising number of people are even more picky about food than they are about their lodgings. I'm talking about adults, not children. On the road you cannot afford to be too selective about where and what you eat. If you're too finicky you'll either starve or spend a LOT of time looking for food (and there's a good chance you'll still not find something that meets your requirements). This may be OK if you're on a restaurant tour but on a motorcycle tour it can ruin the experience.
Another thing you need to understand about me is that I am always hungry. Well, not always. I'm not hungry when I'm sleeping and I'm not hungry while I'm eating. If I eat a huge meal I won't be hungry for maybe an hour, at the most. Other than these three times, I'm hungry as long as I'm awake. I've been like this as long as I can remember. The consequence of this is that I cannot use hunger as an indicator as to when to eat. If I did, I'd be eating all the time and I have better things to do with my time.
Since I'm alway hungry and don't really care for food all that much anyhow, to make sure I get enough food in my normal daily activities (i.e. when I'm not riding), I have a eating schedule. On weekdays I get up and go to work. At work I have a bowl of oatmeal at 07:30. I have lunch at 12:00. At home I eat dinner around 18:30. This plan works great on the days I go to work. Weekends are a food disaster. With errands, yard work, motorcycle rides (in season) and no structure I often forget to eat on the weekend. This is a problem because if I don't eat enough food I get headaches. Not eating enough food is just about the only thing that gives me a headache and when this happens the only thing that will get rid of the headache is to eat a lot and then wait. Aspirin will not help, just food and time (about 8 hours).
You may now be thinking that I'm telling you a lot more that you really want or need to know about my eating habits. This may be true but I think that this information is necessary to understand why eat the way I do while on the road.
When riding a motorcycle you have to be alert. To be alert you have to be well nourished, hydrated, and well rested. For me to stay well nourished I have to have a fairly rigid eating schedule and this schedule is quite different than my normal at-home workday schedule.
On the road I make it a point to eat breakfast but not the first thing in the morning. I get up at about 06:30 and try to be on the road no later than 07:30. I like to ride for an hour or two and then have breakfast some time around 09:00. This avoids the morning rush in most restaurants so I usually don't have to wait very long for the food. I eat a real breakfast, not just oatmeal. I want eggs, hash browns, toast, sausage, milk, orange juice -- the works. This meal has everything I need. I don't have problems with cholesterol or high blood pressure and as long as I don't eat this way all the time everything is just fine. The point is to have a big meal early in the day. You need the energy. Riding a motorcycle is a fair amount of work. Riding a sport bike is even more work.
For the first couple days of a trip I will stop for a relatively light lunch about 13:00 (after the lunch crowd). After I've had a few days on the road and my body has become acclimated to the new schedule, big breakfast, and physical stress, I may skip lunch. I will skip lunch if the riding is relatively low stress as with rural low density traffic and straight line riding. If there have been a lot of twisties or other stress like heavy traffic I'll stop for lunch. I don't use hunger as an indicator of whether or not to eat lunch (remember, I'm always hungry). I go by how tired I feel.
If I haven't eaten any lunch I'll try eat dinner about 17:30, before the dinner rush. If I have eaten lunch, I'll eat dinner about 19:30, at the tail end of the dinner rush. Aside from simply getting some food, my main goal here is to not stand in line. Since I usually start looking for a place to sleep about 16:00, I will have dinner just after arriving at the motel or a couple hours after arriving at the motel. I consider the relative closeness of restaurants when picking a motel.
This eating schedule keeps me well nourished and alert. This schedule also has about 50% more food than I normaly eat. Even with this extra food I usually weigh about 10 lbs (4.5 kg) less at the end of a two week trip. However, this weight loss is temporary and I'm back at my normal 190 lbs (86 kg) within a couple weeks.
If you are into preparing your own meals you can eat almost wherever you want. Those who prepare their own food are almost always camping. Even when I camped, I seldom prepared my own meals. I takes too much time and requires that you bring along a lot of extra stuff. I cover preparing your own food in the camping section.
Notwithstanding what I said earlier about my attitude towards food, I do prefer good food over bad food and I have opinions about what is good and what is bad food. The main difference between me and others is the amount of effort, time, and cost I'm willing to tolerate to get good food. Cost, within reason, is not as important. I'm perfectly willing to pay more for better food -- up to a point. However, in the sort of restaurants I eat in while on the road, cost is only loosely related to quality.
Given my touring style, I'm usually in relatively small towns when looking to eat . In smaller towns the choices are pretty limited. However, there are places that even I won't eat.
I don't know why these two restaurant traits seem to almost always produce bad food but they do. I'm glad I never lived in home of the owners of any of these restaurants It would have been awful.
A roadhouse is "An inn, a restaurant, or a nightclub located on a road outside a town or city." These places are very common in ruaral america and are usually a fairly large one story building. They are almost always sitting by themselves just outside of town on the main road through town. They are (or try to be) the local watering hole. They have a bar section and a restaurant section; sometimes in different rooms, sometimes on different sides of the same room.
Roadhouses seem to do most of their business at night but they are usually (but not always) open for lunch and the remainder of the afternoon with a limited grill. If a roadhouse is open in for lunch and afternoon there is usually not a cook on duty and the cooking is done by the bartender. This limits the menu to hamburgers and such. Although it's pretty hard to screw up a hamburger, I've seen it done many times.
The dinner menu at most roadhouses has more variety than lunch but it's not much better in quality. Roadhouse food is adequate but nothing more. For the most part, roadhouses seem to be more about drinking than eating.
The restaurants in small towns are either in a separate building or in a storefront. By storefront I mean a restaurant that is in a part of a larger building or in a separate building that is so close to the adjacent structures that they all seem to be one big building. You usually find storefront restaurants in the downtown or central area of the town.
The stand-alone type restaurants are usually of the home cooking or family variety as mentioned above and have mediocre to awful food. In larger towns the stand-alone restaurants can be part of a chain like Denny's, Perkins, or smaller regional chains. Chain restaurants have better food at reasonable prices although some chains, like Denny's, Country Kitchen, and Happy Chef are still pretty mediocre.
The storefront restaurants are usually the best bet. Almost all of the really good meals I've had on the road were in storefront restaurants.
There are several varieties of storefront restaurants.
About five years ago I read the book Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. This book is about the author's travels around the U.S.A. in his van. Blue Highways refers to the blue color that some map makers use to represent the smaller minor roads. In his book he says that he uses calendar count to measure the quality of the food in a restaurant. By calendar count I mean the number of calendars hanging on the walls of the restaurant. The more calendars there are on the walls, the better the food. Calendars in the front window are worth bonus points.
After reading Blue Highways I started to try and correlate calendar count with food quality and found that there is something to this. It will take a bit more research but it's worth considering. Generally, you will only see calendars in the store-front Cafe's.
If there are l lot of pickup's parked in front of a cafe in the morning, you have found the place that the local farmers and business people go for morning coffee and breakfast. The place may have a crowd because they have good food but it may just be that it's the only place around or it's cheap.
One other indication I find to be fairly reliable is the police. If there is a police car parked at a restaurant or cafe the food's usually fairly good.
There are no guarantees in where to find decent food in smaller towns. I've had good food in the most unexpected places and had food so bad that I couldn't eat it in supposedly good restaurants. I've tried asking locals but this has not been all that successful. I guess that the people in a lot of towns have just gotten used to crummy food. I've gotten to the point that I just look at the food as part of the adventure and as with all adventure, the good and the bad.
There's at least one myth that needs to be put to rest once and for all. Maybe truck drivers used to know where to find good food but that is most certainly NOT the case today. If you see a lot of trucls parked somewhere all that means is that the place has decent diesel prices and pobably has showers (which you cannot use unless your a trucker). The food will not be all that good.