While planning a trip to Peru earlier this year, my travel partner and I went big. We booked everything from paragliding to a chocolate-making class. It was an exciting trip from start to finish, but at the end, we agreed that the best decision we made the entire time was the very first thing we did: we scheduled a food tour for the first day. The dishes we tried and the things we learned that day gave us a new frame of reference as we ate and explored Peru throughout the rest of our journey.

On our walking food tour of Lima with Lima Experience, we tried chicha morada, a sweet drink made from purple corn, ceviche with the spiciest leche de tigre I’ve ever had, and regional fruit like the lucuma from the Peruvian highlands, which tastes a little like a sweet potato and is hard to find in the U.S. At every stop, our tour guide taught us about the history of the dish we were eating and Peruvians’ relationships to it. Because she was local, our guide knew the less obvious places we would never have found on our own: We visited beloved street vendors where our limited Spanish wouldn’t have sufficed, hidden spots in busy alleyways, and a massive market geared towards Lima residents.

Our guide was delighted to learn that it was our first day. She told us that tourists often do the food tour on their last day, and then regret the timing. If you do the food tour first, she said, you know what you want to eat on the rest of the trip. She was right.

We spent the next four days in Lima finding more versions of the dishes we encountered on the food tour. At Panchita, in the Miraflores neighborhood, we knew to order the papa rellena, deep-fried potatoes stuffed with beef, onions, chiles, and cheese. At an open-air market near our hostel, I beelined to the man selling anticuchos, grilled beefheart skewers. When we left Lima for Cusco, one of the first things my friend sought in the new city was more lucuma.

It’s not just that the food tour gave us context for these meals; chasing our favorites from the tour led us to interesting places across the country that we might not have otherwise visited at all.

While planning a recent trip to Thailand with my roommates, I pushed for us to book a food tour for our first day in any one of the three cities we were visiting. Unfortunately, our schedule was dense, and we fell into the exact trap our guide in Lima had warned us about: The only time that worked was our last day in Chiang Mai. We spent our first few days checking out temples, walking around the night markets, and finding restaurants and local dishes on our own. Chiang Mai was our second stop in Thailand, and we had already eaten well — or so we thought. We had been eating lots of Central Thai food, but had totally neglected the Northern Thai dishes that are the specialty in Chiang Mai.

Over our four-hour experience with A Chef’s Tour, we learned about the differences between these two styles of Thai cooking and the stories behind various Northern Thai dishes. As we ate larb, a spicy minced meat salad, our tour guide taught us about the history of the dish and how in some areas, people prefer to consume the meat raw. In a massive produce and meat market, she encouraged us to sample some crickets, and explained that they’ve been popular in Thailand for many years as a sustainable and affordable protein. As we ate the best pork belly I’ve ever had, she told us about the long history of pork in Thai cuisine. As I fell in love with the restaurants and stands that we visited around Chiang Mai, I was kicking myself for not booking the tour earlier in the trip. It’s a mistake I won’t make again.

Now a friend and I are deep in the planning stages of a New Year’s trip to Colombia. While we’re still working out which cities to visit and how long to stay in each place, there’s one thing I know for certain — a food tour will be the first thing we do.