Off-Broadway actors use food, and hotel-room “kitchens”, to make life on the road feel a little more like home.

A jar of crunchy Skippy peanut butter is eternally tucked between the scuffed-up Converse sneakers and baggy blue jeans in Carolee Carmello’s overstuffed suitcase. For the three-time Tony nominee currently starring in the national touring production of Kimberly Akimbo, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches bring a feeling of familiarity during long weeks on the road. “Right now, I have about half a jar left, so if I use that up before Monday, I’ll have to buy some more,” she says with a laugh.

Not much is constant for actors performing in national tours, which bring productions of Broadway musicals and plays to performing arts centers across the country. After rounds of highly competitive auditions and weeks of rehearsals in Manhattan, the cast and crew pack their lives into suitcases and hit the road. Their contracts last anywhere from six months to a year, performing, on average, eight shows a week in more than twenty-five cities, all while loading and unloading from buses and planes, their luggage in tow. The great Stephen Sondheim said it best: Hi-ho, the glamorous life!

The challenge for the touring actor is creating a consistent work-life balance in an environment that is erratic and ever-changing—finding a grounding sense of familiarity while also experiencing joyous spontaneity. Often, food is the best tool to achieve both.

“Me and my friends put soy sauce in mini travel shampoo bottles,” says Kabir Gandhi, an actor playing Kevin G. in the national tour of Mean Girls. “I have a little box of my go-to Indian cooking spices: turmeric, cumin, Kashmiri red chile powder. And then I also have some sriracha and some chile crunch, and that’s about it.”

Gandhi makes room in his luggage for a two-liter electric hot pot, the perfect size for preparing rajma masala, a traditional Indian kidney bean stew that he grew up making with his family and often returns to on the road. “A lot of my friends who are traveling with pots are also people of color who come from cultures where food is so ingrained,” he says. “It’s been one of the blessings of [being on] tour, to get to experience everyone’s different styles.”

Most of the accommodations offered to actors on tour are standard-size hotel rooms provided by their producers, stocked with a mini fridge and a microwave; if they’re lucky, a small oven and an electric stove are available. In addition, actors are offered a weekly per diem, around $300 to $450, for food and living expenses. The puzzle of luggage space is another challenge, as most productions allow their actors to travel with at most two checked bags.

Joe Rumi worked for over a year as a private chef in New York City before joining the ensemble of the national tour of Hadestown in 2024. On tour, his checked bags are always packed with his Korin chef’s knife and a bag of Maldon salt. Touring with a group of actors offers Rumi a similar experience to his work in the city, showcasing his skills for his castmates on rare days off by cooking family meals like caramelized pork noodles with pickled onions and scallions, or barbecue pulled chicken sandwiches. “I have made some pretty elaborate meals in a hotel room,” he says, like deep-frying tofu for Thai curry in an electric hot pot on one end of the dresser while balancing an Instant Pot with scallion-dressed kaeng kari on the other.

“Not only does having a kitchen make a difference in my personal experience, it feels like I have agency over my life a little bit,” says Talia Suskauer. She’s currently playing Lucille Frank in the national tour of Parade, a musical about the real-life arrest and unfair trial of Jewish American factory manager Leo Frank in turn-of-the-century Georgia. The tragic role of Leo’s wife, she says, is emotionally taxing in a way she has not experienced before.

Before a weekday evening performance or after a Sunday matinee, Suskauer finds cooking with castmates to be a comfortable respite from the traumatic world of the character. “I lived with a castmate in Cleveland, and she loved to bake, and she had a sourdough starter. It’s a tough show, so it’s nice to come home at the end of the day and [find that] your roommate has made cupcakes or is baking bread.” Even so, Suskauer explains that the size of the kitchens can make it difficult to prepare food in them, encouraging her to get creative with her environment. A small office desk becomes a prep space for chopping carrots; a luggage rack becomes a landing pad for sheet trays and baking dishes.

Within the vacuum of a national tour, exploring a new city’s culinary scene can offer something surprising amid a schedule that often feels formulaic. It’s a feeling that Jacob Burns, a former cast member of the national tour of Hamilton, sought in his free time. “I would have never expected to have the best French pastry in Utah or the perfect breakfast tacos in Idaho. I got to really search for some hidden gems,” he recalls, recommending the flaky pain au chocolat at Eva’s Bakery in Salt Lake City and the potato, egg, and cheese breakfast tacos at Tin Roof Tacos in Boise. Ixchel Cuellar, Burns’s friend and Hamilton castmate, would begin researching restaurants for them to visit weeks before landing in a new city, consulting publications like Eater and The Infatuation alongside Instagram posts from writers such as J. Kenji López-Alt and Omar Mamoon. “It was really fun to cultivate a sense of adventure on the road through dining out. I made it a point so that I felt like I really got to know the city I was in,” says Cuellar.

Suskauer says this is her favorite part of touring. While roaming the Corktown district of Detroit, she and a castmate followed their noses to Slows Bar BQ. “We just happened to stumble upon it, and we were like, ‘I guess we’re getting barbecue right now.’” She described fork-tender brisket and pit-smoked baked beans. “It was unbelievable, and we were just in Kansas City and had [just had] barbecue there.… This was better.”

Working across different regions of North America puts actors in a unique position to notice compelling food trends. “A lot of bakeries are leaning Middle Eastern. Everyone wants to put za’atar and feta in anything,” says Rumi. Burns observes that many food trends are exclusive to certain regions, like Hawaiian barbecue in the Pacific Northwest and peri peri chicken in parts of Canada.

Cooking with castmates can be a comfortable respite from the traumatic world of the character.

Dining out is a privilege, and not all actors on national tours have access to the same financial benefits—a lot hinges on whether the tour is union or nonunion. A union tour adheres to the rules of the Actors’ Equity Association, or AEA, the stage actors’ union. Nonunion tours do not.

According to the 2023 ratification of the new AEA unified touring agreement, the minimum weekly salary that an actor must be paid on a Level 1 union tour (the highest-paying of the AEA contracts) is $2,403, with a 4% increase each year that the agreement is in place. All AEA contracts offer actors a weekly per diem starting at $448 for single-occupancy housing, with the option to receive more per diem for double-occupancy housing or for opting out of producer-provided housing altogether. In contrast, a 2023 audition notice for the nonunion tour of Mean Girls, produced by NETworks Presentations, lists the minimum weekly salary for nonunion actors as just $600, with a weekly per diem of $294.

While these rates can vary greatly based on different factors, such as what role they play in the show or what level contract they are on, the contrast in compensation between union and nonunion contracts is substantial. With higher salaries and longer runs in larger metropolitan areas like Houston or Detroit, compared to one-night stays in smaller cities like Morganton, North Carolina, union actors have access to a standard of living that those working on nonunion tours do not.

For Rumi, who is not a member of AEA, that also means missing out an opportunity to put down roots without the stress of changing cities several times in one week. “I do think often about how lovely it would be to be on a union tour and really get to make these new cities home for three weeks or a month. It’d be nice to set up shop and have more family dinners and create connections that way.”

When he leaves the stage door, the sticky residue of microphone tape still present on his cheek, Gandhi heads back to his hotel room and slows down the best way he knows how. “On tour, everything is changing, but the way you cook can remain the same. My little pot’s not much, but it’s constant.”