Eunice Reyes Reveals Five Top Secrets to Vegan Travel
Award-winning, plant-based food traveler Eunice Reyes reveals her 5 top secrets for successful vegan travel as her global travel series streams on UnchainedTV
Los Angeles, April 8th, 2024 — With veganism growing around the world and plant-based restaurants becoming increasingly popular, it’s never been easier to travel and stay true to the key values of health, compassion and sustainability.
Now, an entire industry is developing to meet the needs of vacationers and business travelers who want to enjoy the best in plant-based cuisine wherever they go.
Enter Eunice Reyes!
Her vegan travel show just won two Taste Awards, considered the Oscars of food. Her company, Rated V for Vegan Dining & Travel, produces dynamic video travel guides, restaurant reviews, and showcases plant-based recipes featuring international cuisine. Reyes also organizes vegan tours to fascinating locales around the world where she leads her clients to the top vegan restaurants in the region and makes sure they get to sample plant-based versions of local iconic dishes.
Catch These Culinary Adventures on UnchainedTV
From Mexico City to Singapore, from Seoul to San Diego, fasten your seat belts as Eunice Reyes takes you on a wild ride. On her new series, Vegan Travel with Eunice Reyes, now streaming on UnchainedTV, viewers can experience the world’s very best in plant-based dining. From street food to small cafes to 5-star gourmet restaurants, Reyes has a gift for finding the most inventive and delicious cuisine everywhere she goes. She makes you feel like you are right there with her tasting it while you learn about the history of the region. To celebrate the launch of the series, UnchainedTV host Jane Velez-Mitchell had a chat with her, which you can watch here:
Eunice’s Plant-Based Journey
Eunice Reyes is a plant-based foodie who loves connecting with people, sharing the stories behind their businesses, and presenting the best in plant-based food across the globe. As a former product developer at Nordstrom who had a 9-year career in fashion retail, her expertise lies in creating relationships with vendors, restaurant owners and chefs. Eunice has swept through Asia, Latin America, Europe and beyond. Along with touring the world, Eunice uses her experience to help businesses create new plant-based products. She explains how her adventure began:
“It’s been a journey. It’s funny because, when I started, I wasn’t initially thinking of it as a business. Obviously, like most content creators, they kind of start, ‘Oh, let me just try this.’ I literally started a little over five years ago with an iPhone 7 and a big idea and had no clue what I was doing. I just knew that I, somehow, wanted to showcase worldly vegan food.”
Eunice, born and raised in the United States, is proud of her family’s Salvadoran heritage. Growing up, she got to experience delicious cuisine — with a lot of plant-based ingredients — and become, as she says, a “food nerd.” This is what she recalls:
“Growing up, I’ve always been exposed to vegan and vegetarian food, and I liked it. I always knew that vegan food was very delicious, and was very creative to cook with. I started using it more at home. I would experiment with vegan baking. I’ve always had this interest in health and vegan food.”
Like many vegans today, it was a documentary that led her to take the final step and become a full-fledged vegan. She explains:
“I watched a documentary called What the Health and I remember, after watching it, I was just like, ‘I know too much, I know too much information now. I know I need to just stop eating meat.’ It was one of those things, ‘I need to eventually move toward a vegan diet.’”
“Anything you can eat, I can eat vegan. That is what I like to say. So, you can definitely eat everything you grew up with, you just need to find the right substitute.” — Eunice Reyes, vegan food travel expert
The Process of a Vegan Traveler
As a professional vegan food traveler, Eunice has produced videos in Spain, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, El Salvador, Mexico, Canada, and, of course, the USA. Like all professionals, she’s developed a method to get the most out of her visits. She summarizes it:
“Typically, something I’ll do is, I will search what the popular foods are in that city, in general. What are the iconic foods of that city? Then, once I’ve made a list of what they’re known for, I’ll go into Google, or Instagram, and then specifically type that dish with ‘vegan’ next to it, to see if I can find a restaurant that has a vegan version. So, that’s kind of my thought process, because I want to immerse myself in the culture and the food as well.”
It’s astounding how Eunice has been able to find vegan versions of iconic dishes wherever she goes, from a vegan version of spit-grilled meat in Mexico City to a vegan glass noodle dish in South Korea that’s normally served with meat.
5 Top Vegan Travel Tips
Eunice has five tips for vegan food travelers:
1) Do your research before you travel.
2) Identify the most iconic dish of your destination city.
3) Download the Happy Cow App on your phone so you can find vegan restaurants easily.
4) Travel with a vegan tourism group that knows where to go.
5) Have an open mind…don’t be afraid to ask.
As far as research is concerned, this is what she often does:
“If you log into Instagram, there’s a search bar, and in the search bar I would put hashtag vegan Madrid, vegan Mexico City. Then, you just start seeing all these beautiful photos of food. So, I’ll usually scroll and see what food captivates me, or looks similar to what I’m looking for. I’ll start researching the name of the restaurant. Then, I make my own Google Maps, so I have a Google map for every country I’ve been to.”
Those who want to join her on one of her future trips — like one coming up to Vietnam in November, 2024, or others after that — can go to the Rated V Food Instagram page for more information.
“I think this is just the beginning. Over the last five years, the vegan scene has grown insane, and it’s just going to keep growing, that’s how I see it.” — Eunice Reyes, vegan food travel expert
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