The instinct to avoid supermarkets while travelling is understandable but wrong. In Southern Europe especially, the local supermarket is not a concession to budget constraints - it’s where you find regional cheeses that don’t appear on any restaurant menu, cured meats sold by weight, wine that costs less than a coffee at a tourist café, and bread baked that morning. Treating it as a fallback is missing the point.
In Spain, Mercadona is a mid-range chain with a serious house-brand olive oil selection and vacuum-packed ibérico products at a fraction of what you’d pay in an airport or a deli aimed at visitors. In Greece, even a small-town supermarket will stock local feta varieties, olives packed in herbs, and fresh phyllo that restaurants buy from the same shelf. Italy’s Conad and Coop chains carry regional pasta shapes that vary by province - buying a bag of sagne ‘mpastulate in Basilicata or trofie in Liguria costs under two euros and tells you more about where you are than most guided food tours.
The practical saving is real. A picnic lunch assembled from a supermarket - good bread, local cheese, cured meat, fruit, a small bottle of wine - typically costs four to seven euros per person across most of Southern Europe. The equivalent meal at a sit-down restaurant, even a modest one, runs three to four times that. Do this once a day across a two-week trip and you’ve freed up enough money for two or three genuinely good dinners instead of filling every meal slot with mid-range restaurants where the food is forgettable.
The actual trick is timing
Markdown reductions on fresh items - prepared foods, bakery goods, fresh pasta - happen in the early evening in most Southern European supermarkets, typically an hour or two before closing. This is when a rotisserie chicken that was €9 at noon becomes €4, and when the prepared salads and stuffed vegetables get stickered down. Shopping at this window is not desperate; it is efficient.
Combining this with a small accommodation that has even a basic kitchen - a fridge and a hob - changes the entire financial structure of a trip. You stop treating restaurants as a necessity and start using them selectively, for the meals that are actually worth it.