When you go on vacation to eat; the struggle is real
Adeline loves food, a lot and often, both at home and out. Usually that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the Sunday Roast series, she shares her observations. This week: the struggle of eating on vacation.
I’m the kind of person who spends thirty rounds circling the center of a small town on vacation, scouring every backstreet for hidden signs pointing to local tavernas packed with locals, only to end up at the one place that seemed the most appealing from the start. But by then I feel like I could eat a horse, and my travel companions are grumpy, with sore feet. Going somewhere else with me is great fun.
Nothing tasty to chow down on
Too plastic here, too quiet there, and god forbid there are pictures on the menu. For your own good and self-preservation, I would always advise people traveling with me to let me do some research beforehand. Of course, I’m still talking about those wonderfully grilled aubergines at the little old Greek man’s place in that remote spot where I didn’t even know you could get anything to eat. But that aside. I can panic at the thought that there’s nothing tasty to eat or drink.
A blessing in disguise
That happened in Italy too. Three stumbles away from Como lies Fagetto Lario. With just one restaurant-cum-bakery-cum-village shop-cum-clubhouse, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the family doctor also held practice there. The plastic chairs were faded glory white and there were checked tablecloths on the tables; perhaps they were even oilcloth. The lighting was set to fluorescent-tube volume, and the football match sometimes drowned out the clatter of pans from the kitchen. Not my first choice, but I was heading for a break-up, so we settled in. I guided myself through the menu with my 14 words of Italian, because English was not an option, and in my memory everything I ate there was close to orgasmically delicious. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover, or something like that. The pizzas sticking out over the edges of the plates, the gigantic antipasti platters and a tagliatelle with gamberini so phenomenal that I would want to go back tomorrow just to spend the entire evening hovering over that plate. We ate for 9 euros per person, including a generous amount of wine, and ate there five of the six evenings. We tried Como itself once, on a polished terrace for three times the price of Fagetto; I’m still recovering from the abysmal service and quality.
Now you may understand how I became a vacation repeat offender: I go back to eat. This was the blessing-in-disguise experience I still talk about.
What a bloody mess
In the spirit of returning, I booked a weekend in Ameland last week. The last time I was there was in stormy November, and in my mind it had been wonderfully romantic. I remembered long beach walks, bottles of wine by a fire pit on the terrace, a beach club beneath the lighthouse where I wanted to live, and the bizarrely cozy restaurant on the last evening, which turned out to be a hotel too. The room was quickly reserved. I was already thinking about our first dinner there, a freshly baked breakfast the next morning and… Suddenly I remembered that I hadn’t actually eaten anything good there apart from that. Damn. Bloody damn. Damn.
Better safe than sorry
A little sour, but still hopeful because after all, it had been years ago, I started Googling. TheFork produced a list on which our hotel-cum-restaurant indeed ranked near the top, but doing the math quickly, we would still have at least six occasions when we’d have to fend for ourselves. Someone mentioned a beach shack, which did indeed turn out to be the beach club in question, and ever since I can think only of the lousy Italian place where the lasagna sheets weren’t cooked through, the steakhouse where you could knock someone out with a sirloin, and the lunchroom where I only dared order French onion soup.
And suddenly you become that person. So now I’m wondering whether I should reserve all the afternoons and evenings at the hotel in advance, like we did in Fagetto. Better safe than sorry.
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