When people ask me what I do for a living, the words “food writer” become stuck in my throat. I can’t deny that I write about food and I certainly can’t say I don’t write about restaurants, given the amount of time I spend in them. But I do wonder if it’s all a smokescreen. There’s a story I love about the late LA Weekly food critic Mr Jonathan Gold, which might explain things. At the height of his powers, having mapped every corner of Los Angeles in taco carts, burrito stalls, Korean strip malls and Thai drinking dens, he was about to host a fellow food obsessive, his counterpart on New York’s The Village Voice, Mr Robert Sietsema. Sure, he could take him to any one of the hidden spots he had discovered over the years and blow Mr Sietsema’s mind, but he knew this wouldn’t cut the mustard. No, the question was a matter of location. Could he find somewhere inconvenient enough for a grizzled traveller accustomed to the lengthy travails of the New York transit system? Then the answer came to him: a road trip.

Messrs Gold and Sietsema are pioneers of what you might call “gastrogeography”. Over their combined 56 years of writing about food, they changed the eating habits of two cities. Through the power of their descriptions of food and the city, they convinced people to walk, drive, take the bus or jump on a train to unknown urban territories.

They expanded the definition of what was considered good food and where was considered a good place to eat it. And they forced a population used to travelling towards a centre or their local neighbourhood to look outwards to the fringes, to working-class areas, immigrant areas, areas where livings were eked out in the most unlikely spaces by those who were, in Mr Gold’s words, at the “entry-level point of capitalism”.

They didn’t just influence hungry Angelenos and New Yorkers, but a whole way of thinking about restaurants and their relationship to the urban environment. Talk to anyone from either of those cities and you will find someone who has driven from one side of town to another, to a suburb they hadn’t heard of, in search of a mole Mr Gold said they must try, or travelled to the end of a subway line and taken a bus to areas that were villages on Long Island 100 years ago to go on a crawl of Korean barbecue restaurants Mr Sietsema had recommended.

On my first trips to New York and Los Angeles, I had the uncanny sense of being somewhere I had already been because of the vividness of their writing. I had, in my mind, ridden shotgun in Mr Gold’s shabby green pick-up as he drove around the San Gabriel Valley’s infinite asphalt sprawl with Sichuan restaurants as big as London’s retail outlets. I had sat next to Mr Sietsema on the 7 train as it rumbled through the pupusa carts of Jackson Heights.

It was not by chance that I trekked to Tacos el Palomas (by bus) for Sinaloan tacos de cabeza. Suddenly, I was passing through South Los Angeles, the waiting room of Dr Dre, the kingdom of Mr Kendrick Lamar. While eating the astonishing tacos, made from every bit of the cow’s head, steamed whole, less nose to tail than eyes to tongue, I also marvelled that I was here in the oppressive heat, near Rosecrans Avenue, experiencing the place where some of the most influential music of the past 30 years had been nurtured. It was a perfect confluence of taste, time and place. Would I ever have come here otherwise?

When we travel, we engage with cities through the prism of our own interests; some people would have visited Compton solely for the music; others would have searched for the dried-out husk of the LA River as a matter of potamology, urban design or simply because of an interest in the film Grease. Food is another reason for travelling, a way of simplifying a complex landscape into connected nodes of restaurants, but we are strangely averse to doing it in London. Part of the problem is that travelling in London simply isn’t romantic.

There are British food writers who make pilgrimages to Flushing when they visit New York, but they wouldn’t be seen dead in Dagenham. It’s thrilling to ride around the 405 in a hire car, less so to take the 102 bus round the North Circular.

If you consider the layout of Los Angeles, 17th-century mathematician Mr Blaise Pascal’s definition of nature comes to mind: “an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. You can be on the fringes of the city in Venice Beach and still feel like you are at the centre of the most interesting place in the world.

This breeds an attitude that the most important places in the city are the neighbourhoods, that no area can outrank another simply due to its geographical location, that every neighbourhood has something to offer if you look hard enough.

In London, we’re stuck with the black hole that is Zone 1, sucking everything into its maw. “Londoners think of restaurants in two basic groupings: town restaurants, which are in Zone 1 and reviewed by the papers, and local restaurants, within a 10-minute walk of their home,” says Mr Ed Cumming, a TV and food writer for The Independent. “Partly, it’s because in the past there wasn’t much reason to travel. There’s a lingering perception that each of these local areas has the same options: a pub, an Indian, an Italian, a Chinese, all more or less identical, so why would you bother going to another area’s local restaurants?”

That said, the tyranny of Zone 1’s density, along with increasing gentrification and the small matter of a global pandemic displacement, has meant that, with tectonic slowness, the most interesting things have drifted to the fringes. The outer boroughs of London can feel like separate cities. The North and South Circular used to demarcate authenticities. Inside and you’re a real Londoner; outside and you’re in the boondocks. Now there is almost a pride in being from the borders.

Acton, Croydon, Ilford, Edmonton, once places to pick up a sofa, are now immortalised in music. Will we soon see tourists walking up Meridian Way in Tottenham on the trail of JME and Skepta, taking photographs in front of Ikea and stopping off at Neco Tantuni for long Turkish cigars of chopped lamb mince in lavash?

As far as I know, Messrs Gold and Sietsema never visited London, but if I could be their guide, I would take them to Hounslow, where everything is soundtracked by the roar of Heathrow’s aeroplanes and where Taste of Pakistan is responsible for perhaps London’s most muscular sub-continental barbecue: fragrant spatchcocked chickens and legs of lamb, chapli kebabs like hubcaps, gigantic naan breads on hooks. I would take them to Barking Road in Newham, which has a thriving West African scene as big as anything in Harlem.

We’d go to a mini-mall in northwest London that has a Goan street-food stall, a canteen that sells 100 varieties of dosa and a stand carefully assembling paan for Gujaratis in need of a quick fix, staining the streets of Wembley with illicit scarlet. Or we’d visit Erith, right on the border with Kent where the Thames becomes a sea, home to one of London’s biggest Nigerian communities, alive with the smell of barbecued suya from Korede’s Africoal, the astringent hit of pepper soup from K’s Spice, where elderly Nigerians fashion scoops from pounded yam, to dip into egusi and efo riro.

Messrs Gold and Sietsema showed us that cities contain whole worlds within their borders. I think the main reason I travel for in search of food is to try and make sense of my city’s communities, to piece together the awkward jigsaw that makes up a city called London. You see how people of different cultures live cheek by jowl. Travelling in your own city to new areas, to engage with new communities, to eat new food is a humble reminder that a city may be yours, but it also belongs to everyone else who buys into this chaos, whether they choose it or are born into it.

One of the greatest privileges of living in a diverse city is walking into a restaurant serving a community that is not your own but one you live alongside, being served by a waiter who speaks a first language you do not understand, to be at once in your home and a guest, to receive hospitality and share a warm meal, conversation and a mutual understanding of pleasure.