Every region has a dish it is known for, and the version served to visitors is frequently a simplified representative of a considerably wider tradition.
Finding the actual cooking of a place requires looking past the thing it is famous for.
Why the famous dish is not representative
Several mechanisms produce this.
Portability. The dishes that travel and become known are the ones that survive being made elsewhere, which is a specific and unrepresentative subset.
Simplicity. Something requiring an ingredient available only locally, or a technique requiring practice, does not become the export.
And commercial selection. A dish that can be produced consistently at volume for visitors becomes the visible one, regardless of its place in the actual tradition.
Which means the famous dish is frequently a real dish that occupies a smaller place locally than its reputation suggests.
Where the actual cooking is
The places worth looking, in rough order of reliability.
Domestic settings, which are generally unavailable and which is why home cooking traditions are the least documented.
Markets, where the ingredients tell you what the cooking is built on, and where prepared food is aimed at people working there.
Places attached to a workplace — near a market, a depot, an industrial area — feeding people on a schedule at a price they will pay daily.
Institutions with a fixed clientele, which cook the same thing repeatedly for people who would notice a decline.
And events — festivals, religious occasions, seasonal celebrations — where dishes appear that are not made at other times.
The seasonal dimension
Which is larger in traditional cooking than most visitors expect.
Regional cuisines developed around what was available when, and a substantial number of dishes exist only at particular times of year.
Which means visiting outside that window means the dish is either unavailable or made with imported substitutes.
Asking what is in season, and what people are eating now rather than what the region is known for, produces a very different and more interesting answer.
The question that works
Having tried several phrasings.
Asking what somebody ate yesterday, rather than what the local speciality is, produces an honest answer about ordinary eating rather than a recommendation about what visitors should try.
Asking where somebody eats when they are not working similarly.
And asking what a visitor usually misses, which people enjoy answering and which produces the most useful responses.
The authenticity trap
Worth addressing since the pursuit can become its own distortion.
Cuisines change constantly and always have. A dish as made now is not less authentic than a version from decades ago; it is the current form of a living tradition.
Restaurants serving visitors are also part of the local economy and frequently employ local cooks making food they know.
And the search for the most authentic version can become a performance in itself, which is a familiar failure mode among people who take food travel seriously.
The useful objective is eating well and learning something, rather than certifying anything.
What travels badly and is worth seeking
The categories most rewarding to eat where they belong.
Anything depending on absolute freshness — seafood, dairy, certain vegetables — where the version elsewhere is a different substance.
Anything fermented locally, where the result depends on the place.
Anything requiring a specific piece of equipment or fuel.
And anything eaten in a specific context — at a particular time, in a particular way, with particular company — where the setting is part of it.
The practical approach
What I actually do arriving somewhere new.
The market first, on the first morning, to establish what is there.
Eat where people are eating at the hour they eat, which requires knowing the hour and is the single most reliable method.
Ask the questions above rather than asking for recommendations.
And eat the famous dish once, since it is famous for a reason, without treating it as the point of the visit.
The diaspora version
Worth mentioning because it is frequently overlooked and frequently excellent.
Communities that migrated carry cooking with them, and the food in those communities is sometimes closer to an older form than what is currently made in the region of origin.
It also adapts to local ingredients, which produces genuinely new dishes that exist nowhere else.
Which means the best version of a regional cuisine is occasionally a long way from the region, and dismissing it as inauthentic misses what is actually interesting about it.
Cooking classes, assessed
Since they are widely offered and vary enormously.
The good ones start at a market, cook a small number of dishes properly, and are taught by somebody who cooks that food ordinarily.
The poor ones assemble pre-prepared components in a demonstration kitchen and produce nothing you could reproduce.
The distinguishing questions are whether you shop first, how many people are in the class, and whether you actually cook or watch.
A good one is among the more useful things available to a visitor, since it explains the logic of a cuisine rather than delivering recipes.