European Cuisine is as varied and fascinating as its cultures, climates and people. Your European voyage of discovery shouldn’t stop for dinner, so here’s my top ten local dishes you should sample on your travels:

Chocolate sponge cake coated with a layer of apricot jam, smothered with a dark chocolate icing and served in the stylish café of the Hotel Sacher where it was invented – this is the closest you’ll get to true decadence until you win the lottery and can afford the 1000 euro base price for the rooms at this historic hotel! Film buffs will recognise the hotel from Carol Reed’s The Third Man. A great place for a suave snack whilst exploring the city’s beautiful centre.

Though there may be countless imitators, nothing beats an enormous  vat of paella, properly cooked in the place where it was born. Whilst classic Valencian paella uses chicken and rabbit and is not to be missed, the colourful seafood version might be more familiar to us Brits. Globe-trotting writer Ernest Hemmingway was famously a fan of the paella at ‘La Pepica’ – which is still standing in Valencia today, and as good as ever. We thoroughly recommend you check it out.

You can’t go to Stockholm without trying this Nordic salmon dish – thin salt-cured salmon with a pinch of sugar, lemon and dill served on toast or rye-bread. In a city famous for its salmon dishes this is the one to get. Scandinavian food is the hero of the moment in Britain, and rightly so. Stockholm is full of great restaurants – for the best gravadlax I’d recommend De Svarta Faren in the Södermalm district.

Although your previous encounters with the humble kebab may be from a neon-lit grease shack just before sunrise, you might be surprised to find that in Berlin they take it far more seriously. Invented in West Berlin by Turkish immigrant Kadir Nurman in 1972, the Doner Kebab has become an institution in the German capital. The humble kebab, perhaps unsurprisingly, goes just as well with German Pilsner as it does a British ale but, through superior cooking technology and ingredients, tastes great when sober too! Berliners swear by the Imren Grill near Hermannplatz – so what better place to rediscover this much-maligned dish.

An alpine classic! A hot stone is brought to your table along with a platter of thinly cut raw meats – usually duck, chicken, veal and beef – ready for you to prepare a carnivore’s banquet to your own taste. This is a great social experience to share with friends after a day in the mountains – such a delicious protein-carb load is best eaten at altitude after coming in from the snow.

Why have one local dish when you can try a bit of them all? Our number one lets you do just that. Order three or four of these local dishes per person and share them amongst your friends as you drink a chilled Estrella tucked away on one of the city’s characteristic cobbled streets. Barcelona surely must have the most tapas bars per capita in the world – and this makes it hard to pick the right one. The best thing to do is to avoid larger tapas bars with foreign language advertising – these bars often serve lower quality food and are much more expensive. Instead stray down the smaller streets and see what you can find – traditional tapas bars will be barely big enough to hold 30 people, offering an intimate and unique dining experience. The prices are also much more reasonable. A popular one with Barca’s students is Elisabets but it’s easy to stumble across a little known local tapas bar as you wander through the streets.