I plan trips around food.
The tiny place someone mentioned once. The dish you order twice. The door you almost miss.
That’s where NODO started.
Not necessarily with the famous places. More often with the room you walk past three times, the cook who doesn’t care how it photographs, or the dish that makes the next table go quiet for a second.
Restaurants matter. But the part that sticks is usually everything around them — the neighbourhood, the smell when the door opens, the thing someone puts in the middle and everybody reaches for without asking.
I thought the answer was a restaurant.
A restaurant stays in one place.NODO doesn’t have to.
Sometimes NODO happens inside a restaurant. Sometimes somewhere that was never supposed to be one. The food can change, the city can change, the people can change. The table stays.
Why NODO?
The name comes from the word for knot in Italian and Spanish. That is only where the word comes from. The reason it stuck is more personal.
Behind NODO is a German-Vietnamese upbringing and a relationship with identity that never fit neatly into one box. Food became one way of understanding that. Travel became another.
Eating somewhere you don’t understand the language. Ordering what the table next to you is having. Finding the place nobody recommended because nobody thought to put it on a list.
You learn a lot about people through what they eat. Sometimes you learn something about yourself too.
NODO came out of that. Not as an answer to where you belong, but as a way of finding out.
Food. Places. People. Stories. Tie enough of them together and eventually you have a table.