Europe for Foodies: How (and Why) to Incorporate Food into Your Travels

The term “foodie” is trendy these days. It sounds pretentious, and a little silly. But I’ve decided to take that word back, for food-lovers everywhere. There’s nothing wrong with being a “foodie.” It simply means that you prioritize food in your life — and in your travels.

Some travelers eat to live. I live to eat. And the more I make food a central focus of my travels, the clearer it becomes that to really appreciate a culture, you need to understand its food. Because in a sense, food is culture.

Finish this phrase: Swiss ___. For all its claims to fame, and the end of the day, Switzerland is synonymous with cheese. It’s part of their international brand and their national identity. And the government invests generous subsidies in keeping this part of Swiss culture alive. To this day, Swiss farmers — now federally funded — still make cheese the old-fashioned way. Each spring, they take their herd of cows up to high-mountain huts, on pastures called “alps,” and hang their decorative cowbells from the eaves. There they stay with their livestock for 100 days, all summer long — milking them at dawn and at dusk, and spending their days making cheese. And then one day in September, when cool weather announces the onset of autumn, the cowhands sling those giant bells around their cows’ necks and walk them back down into the village in the valley below — creating an impromptu parade of flower-bedecked cows, enjoying a victory lap after a productive summer, to a soundtrack of clanging bells and satisfied moos.

What type of food do you associate with Spain? Tapas, of course — small plates. But a deeper understanding of Spanish cuisine tells you volumes about the Spanish culture, climate, and landscape. In arid, blistering Iberia, people take a mid-day siesta to head home, eat a big lunch, and hide out from the heat for a couple of hours. They return to work for a few more hours, and then, just as the sun goes down and temperatures grow tolerable, they go for a paseo — a languid stroll through the city streets, promenading with friends and family, greeting neighbors, and dropping into a variety of cozy bars and cafés. After a day cooped up inside, avoiding the heat, the last thing you want is to settle in for a long, sit-down dinner. So instead, you nibble on little plates of food at the bar — sharing a variety of dishes with friends old and new, sipping drinks, cracking jokes, socializing. Then you head to the next bar, for some new dishes (and some new friends). “Tapas-style” dining isn’t a trend — it’s a social ritual and a way of life, shaped over eons by Spain itself.

What are the two most beloved European cuisines? If you’re like most people, you’re thinking of Italian and French. (If you’re an odd duck like me, Hungarian might have crept into the mix.) Italian and French cuisine are equally enticing, and yet, so fundamentally different.

In sun-drenched Italy — the garden patch of Europe — cuisine is all about highlighting quality ingredients. The fewer ingredients, and the less they’re manipulated, the better. I once took a cooking class in Tuscany where Marta taught me how to make the most delicious sauce ever to cross my palate. It has just five ingredients: tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, and salt. And it makes everything it touches explosively flavorful. This emphasis on fresh ingredients also makes Italian cuisine highly localized. Why are there so many types of pasta? Because each one is engineered to highlight a particular sauce or topping, usually rooted in a highly specific place and season. (Those pasta places where you “pick your noodles, then pick your sauce” make Italians furious.) Specialties aren’t just regional — they can be specific to a town, or even to a neighborhood. And Italian law forbids restaurants from using frozen ingredients unless they’re noted on the menu.

In French cuisine, the ingredients are less important than what you do with them. I once took a cooking class in Burgundy, where every dish had at least a dozen ingredients — and each recipe involved mastering a precise, delicate technique. French chefs are technicians, who endlessly play and tinker and experiment to create something delicious. Who, but the French, would look at snails crawling across a rain-dampened path and think, “I’ll bet if I cooked those in garlic butter, they’d be delicious”? Beyond escargot, think of the other most famous French dishes: Coq au vin takes the toughest, least palatable type of poultry — rooster — and slow-simmers it in red wine and spices until it’s tender and flavorful. Bœuf bourguignon does the same with tough cuts of beef. And confit de canard is a duck that’s been rendered, preserved in a sealed can of its own congealed fat, then opened up months later and cooked in that same fat. That’s not a recipe — that’s a science experiment. So much of French cooking feels like it was created on a dare. And yet, it’s delicious. And it’s beautiful. French chefs are also elegant artists, who employ their technique to create stunning masterpieces, as pleasing to the eye as to the palate. French salads aren’t just jumbled together — they’re composée…composed.

These are just a few examples of how food can play a much larger role in your travels than simply filling the tank. And that’s the topic of my “Europe for Foodies” class, which we filmed earlier this year and is now available to view on Ricksteves.com and YouTube (and below).

Of all the travel talks I do at Rick Steves’ Europe, “Europe for Foodies” is my favorite. It’s the one that my audiences seem to enjoy the most. And, strangely, it’s also the least-attended.

Maybe people already take it for granted that food is important in travel — or are confident that it isn’t. But the purpose of this talk is to deepen your appreciation for the many vivid travel experiences where food and culture intersect. Like a French chef who makes snails delicious, I’ve engineered this talk to fine-tune your culinary sensibilities, with ample suggestions for incorporating food in your travels. If you’ve enjoyed my many blog posts about food in Europe…this talk is for you.

In the talk, I introduce age-old European culinary concepts that are newly trendy these days, including terroir, zero-kilometer, nose-to-tail, and the importance of eating with the seasons. I also suggest practical tips for finding the best restaurants, and explain some subtleties of dining in Europe that can be confusing. Sometimes this requires psychoanalyzing the way Europeans conceptualize food: You’ll learn why Italians can’t understand how anyone could drink a caffé latte after lunchtime, why they serve your salad after the pasta, and why that stubborn server won’t bring your bill to the table until you’ve asked for it.

I run through some of my favorite cheap eats in Europe (from German Currywurst to Greek souvlaki to Sicilian arancine to Polish zapiekanka) and the best food halls and street markets. And there are sections on drinking (wine, beer, spirits, and café culture) and sweets — from Belgian chocolates to Italian gelato. Finally, I suggest some experiences that allow you to incorporate food into your travels: cooking classes, food tours, visits to local farms, chasing a truffle-sniffing dog through an oak forest, getting to know a Slovenian beekeeper, and so on.

I hope you enjoy my “Europe for Foodies” talk as much as I enjoyed putting it together. And remember: Every meal you have in Europe is an opportunity to have a cultural experience.


If you enjoy reading my blog posts that focus on food, you can find a roundup here.

Check out my full 1.25-hour “Europe for Foodies” talk on Ricksteves.com and YouTube. (You can find the handout for the class here.)

If you’re tight on time, you can also check out shorter chapters separately:

 

Columbus, Ohio: Unexpected Foodie Mecca

I recently made a trip back home to Central Ohio, where I grew up before moving to Seattle in 2000. Normally, my blog focuses on European travel. But you can also “travel” back home — approaching it through the eyes of a visitor. And when I do that, I’m doubly impressed by the remarkable foodie scene that’s percolating in my formerly meat-and-potatoes hometown. If you’re headed to Columbus, be ready for some great food — from Himalayan dumplings and explosively flavorful fried chicken, to high-end molecular gastronomy feasts, to artisanal microbrews and spirits, to the best damn ice cream in the land. And if you aren’t going to Columbus anytime soon…well, maybe you should.

Aaah, Columbus, Ohio. Flyover country. The heartland. The Heart of It All. The crossroads of the good ol’ U-S-of-A. And, for me, home. But these days, tucked amid the cornfields and strip malls of Central Ohio is also one of the most exciting culinary scenes in the United States. Who knew?

I spent my 20 most formative years (from age 5 to age 25) in Central Ohio — in the small town of Delaware, a half-hour’s drive north of Columbus. Back then, Central Ohio was the farthest thing from a culinary mecca. But it had all of the ingredients of one — in a literal sense. Ohio’s sultry summers give rise to a cornucopia of lush produce. No more perfect food exists than a juicy cob of Ohio sweet corn, right off the stalk. And Ohio (where one of the leading cities is called Cleave-land) has always had a top-tier meat industry. My next-door neighbor raised prizewinning hogs, which sold for some of the highest prices in the country.

And yet, when I was living there, local restauranteurs hadn’t quite caught up with local producers. Consider the Ohio State Fair butter cow. Now, get this: Dairy sculptors take a full ton of rich, creamery butter and fashion it into a full-sized statue of a cow. The butter cow is kept in a refrigerated glass case that a half-million fairgoers shuffle past with a hushed reverence, like visitors to the tomb of Lenin. (I am not making this up. Did I mention the butter cow is life-sized?) The year I graduated from high school, in a beautiful synergy of Central Ohio food theming, the butter cow was joined by a full-sized butter statue of Dave Thomas, founder of Columbus-based fast food chain Wendy’s.

Looking back, using mountains of butter to sculpt statues seems an almost too on-the-nose symbol for a city that had more great food than it really knew what to do with. They had the ingredients, and the industriousness. It just hadn’t yet coalesced.

When I moved away from Central Ohio in 2000, the food scene there was just getting rolling. Chains were beginning to be nudged aside by quality local restaurants. (In the 1990s, Cameron Mitchell built the foundations of a culinary empire that’s still expanding. Today he’s preparing to open a trendy food hall in the former Budd Dairy building.)  I believe things really turned a corner just a decade and a half ago, when Jeni Britton Bauer, from her humble ice-cream stand in Columbus’ North Market, figured out a way to harness Central Ohio’s natural bounty and turn it to the best ice cream on the planet. (More on Jeni’s ice cream later.) Jeni led the vanguard of a new foodie awareness, and a new foodie pride, in Central Ohio. And today, Columbus is blossoming into one of the best food cities in the USA.

With each return visit, my in-laws — in an endearing if fruitless quest to convince us to move back home — take my wife and me on a culinary tour around the city. Those first few years, these food tours felt a little forced. But then something strange started to happen: The places they took us were actually good. Really good. And after our last visit, it’s official: Columbus has arrived. It’s a city I’d seriously consider traveling to just for the food.

The best embodiment of Columbus’ foodie renaissance is the city’s Short North,  a trendy corridor stretching along High Street from the main campus of Ohio State University to downtown. Longtime favorites here include Tasi, a delightful breakfast, brunch, and lunch café with delicious comfort food and a neighborhood bustle; Bakersfield,  an upmarket bar-taqueria; and Northstar Caféan organic stay-a-while cafeteria with great salads and sandwiches.

But the epicenter of the foodie scene in the Short North — and Columbus generally — is the North Market, which hides between brick warehouses on the northern edge of downtown. Now, I moved from Columbus to the city with perhaps the most famous market in America. You know…the one where they throw fish. But the problem with Seattle’s Pike Place Market is exactly that: its fame. Years before I moved to town, the Pike Place Market had already been transformed into an almost entirely touristy venture. I rarely visit Pike Place Market, unless I’m entertaining out-of-towners. And if I do wind up at the market at mealtime, I panic a little bit, because I have no confidence I’ll find a good meal. Most eateries are squarely pitched at the palates of people piling off one of the world’s largest cruise ships, moored out front every Saturday. (Apologies to the exceptions.)

But Columbus’ North Market?  Now, that’s a place I could have lunch every single day and never get bored. Unpretentious and packed with temptations, the North Market has been the incubator for Columbus’ burgeoning foodie scene. Its main floor is a warren of producers and food vendors, offering everything from toothsome Polish pierogi to flavorful Vietnamese vermicelli bowls to crisp French macarons. Each stand is more tempting than the last, but two are particularly worth trying.

First is Momo Ghar, serving a short-and-simple menu of savory handmade Nepalese-style dumplings called momos. Food snobs shouldn’t be put off by the Guy Fieri endorsement — this place is straight-up fantastic, and a perfect example of how curious foodies and Columbus’ growing immigrant populations mix and mingle at the North Market.

But if you have only one meal at the North Market, head upstairs. There you’ll find Hot Chicken Takeover, filling a long, industrial-mod hall. Not only does this place have the best Nashville-style fried chicken I’ve ever eaten — juicy, tender, and perfectly seasoned — but it’s socially conscious, priding itself on being a “fair chance employer” (the majority of their staff are formerly incarcerated or formerly affected by homelessness).

As you get in line, a chalkboard on the wall counts down how many pieces of today’s fresh chicken are still available. The line moves fast, and soon you’re ordering your preferred spiciness level, from “cold” to “fire” (casual palates max out at “warm”). While waiting for your name to be called, grab a free cup of iced tea — super-sweet or unsweetened — and fill a little tub of ranch sauce. (No barbecue sauce here. The chicken is so juicy and flavorful, you won’t miss it.)  Find a seat at a shared table, with strategically placed rolls of rough brown paper towels, and wait for your name to be called. They have only a few sides — macaroni and cheese, coleslaw — but they’re also perfectly executed.

If you just want a snack at the market, Brezel has an enticing array of German-style pretzels (and smaller pretzel twists), ranging from sweet to savory. On my latest visit, they had one encrusted with Crunch Berries, and another with melted slivers of smoked gouda. Nearby is Cajohns Flavor and Fire,  with a dizzying array of salsas and hot sauces to suit every palate, from mild and sweet to unadulterated heat. I already have my personal favorites here (the salsa verde and the chipotle salsa are tops), but I can never resist the long tasting bar.

And now…dessert. And for dessert, there’s no better choice — in the North Market, in Columbus, and quite possibly in the United States of America — than Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. As I mentioned earlier, Jeni Britton Bauer started her ice cream stand right here in 2002. She befriended her fellow market vendors and suppliers, and engineered ways to infuse her ice creams with the essence of their produce. For example, her Backyard Mint is an off-white ice cream that tastes like actual mint — the kind that grows like a weed in your garden — rather than synthetic peppermint essence and neon-green coloring. Another summertime North Market inspiration is her Sweet Corn and Black Raspberries, which speaks for itself.

Jeni’s ice cream is the perfect expression of the form. It’s the In-N-Out Burger of frozen dairy products. The texture is smooth and creamy — rich, but not too rich. It melts on your tongue exactly the way you want it to. And the flavors… well, the flavors are magnificent. Jeni has the nerve to christen her ice cream with superlative names that can’t possibly be true (“The Milkiest Chocolate In The World”)…but somehow live up to the fuss.

Jeni’s flavors are simple, yet complex. Like a perfectly composed dish by a master chef, every ingredient has its place — each one hits its note, perfectly on-pitch, without overshadowing the others. Take the Bangkok Peanut. It’s a rich, creamy peanut butter flavor. Not fakey Jiff peanut butter — the real stuff, nutty and rich, from the health food aisle. To that, she adds coconut that’s been toasted to the point of perfect caramelization. And finally, she tosses in a pinch of cayenne pepper, which tickles the back of your throat just so — adding an exquisite, exotic twist the moment after you’ve already swallowed and think you’ve experienced every nuance of the flavor. An ice cream that finishes hot sounds like a gimmick, but in Jeni’s hands, it’s a masterpiece.

In addition to a long list of perennial flavors (don’t get me started on the Gooey Butter Cake), there are always a few changing seasonal flavors. I’ll never forget her Pumpernickel ice cream from a few Christmases ago. On my latest visit, she had another one of my favorites — Savannah Buttermint. It tastes like a dish of chewy after-dinner mints suspended in a creamy broth. The Pickled Mango is a fascinating mix of sweet and sour. And the Watermelon Buttermilk Frozen Yogurt tastes like the best tangy watermelon you’ve ever eaten…only better.

I could go on and on about Jeni’s flavors (apparently so). But recently she topped herself by coming up with the ultimate delivery system for her ice cream: the Buttercrisp Waffle Cone. Imagine taking a traditional cone, hot and fresh off the griddle, and dipping it into a vat of melted salty butter. The cone is a perfect synthesis of soft, crisp, sweet, and salty. It’s so good, it threatens to upstage the ice cream.

A few years ago, Jeni published a cookbook that teaches the home chef to make ice cream that’s nearly as good as what she does in her shops — and quite rightly won a James Beard Award. (Having made a couple dozen batches of Jeni’s at home, I can attest that if you follow her instructions carefully, it turns out great.) Jeni has a serious mail-order business, and has opened several additional scoop shops around Columbus, and in other US cities. But visiting the mothership in person, at the Columbus North Market, is a pilgrimage.

OK, enough with the ice cream. (Though, let’s be honest: Can there ever be enough ice cream?) Apologies for getting carried away. My in-laws have gently teased me that I come to Columbus as much for Jeni’s as for them. I have, to date, not disabused them of this notion.

The Short North and North Market may be ground zero for Columbus’ foodie explosion, but other destination eateries are scattered around the metro area, too.

Just a few blocks east of High Street, in the Italian Village neighborhood, runs Fourth North, which has recently flourished as an arterial for artisanal breweries: Wolf’s Ridge (with a particularly well-regarded attached restaurant, and more affordable taproom), Seventh Son, and Hoof Hearted.

Just west of downtown, in an industrial corner of the posh Grandview neighborhood, those who look will find Watershed Distillery. In addition to offering tours of the facility where they distill a wide variety of spirits from Central Ohio ingredients (such as apple brandy), they operate a fun cocktail bar and restaurant. They publish the most entertaining cocktail menu I’ve seen, with choices like “Teenage Dirtbag” and “Big Papi.” The cuisine is bold and experimental, melding local favorite dishes with flourishes that challenge the palate — such as big slabs of ribs with Asian accents.

My favorite high-end restaurant in Central Ohio used to be incongruously located in the humble downtown shopping zone of my hometown, Delaware, Ohio — literally across the street from the three-screen movie theater where I worked my way through college. Foodies from all over Ohio would flock to Veritas for Chef Josh Dalton’s high-end, confident cookery — harnessing the state of the culinary art with a typically Central Ohio lack of pretense. A few years ago, I had a dinner at Veritas that was the best-value meal, dollar for dollar, that I’ve had anywhere — creativity and execution on the caliber of a European Michelin-starred restaurant, but at Delaware, Ohio, prices.

Chef Dalton’s ambition and command of molecular gastronomy — savory bacon risotto with perfectly delicate sous vide egg; scallop with pungent kimchi and crispy rice; Wagyu beef short rib with palate-blasting chimichurri — has cultivated many foodie converts amid the cornfields of Central Ohio. Recently Veritas moved to a location more befitting its world-class cuisine — in downtown Columbus, between the North Market and the statehouse — and raised its prices accordingly ($90 for the eight-course tasting menu). But it’s still an unmissable opportunity to blow up any preconceptions you might have that Columbus is a Podunk culinary wasteland.

There are many other excellent choices scattered within and around the I-270 outerbelt, but this representative sampling of why I get excited anytime I head back to Ohio…beyond the chance to reconnect with family and friends. I realize I am biased. But, believe me, nobody was more suspicious of Central Ohio’s lackluster culinary scene than someone who fled to the wilds of Washington State. Take it from this prodigal son: Columbus, Ohio, is the most underrated foodie destination in the USA.

Dining at Europe’s Foodie Splurge Restaurants: A Practical Guide

These days, more and more travelers are investing serious time and money in top-end fine-dining experiences across Europe. And on a few special occasions, I’ve jumped on this bandwagon — spending more on a meal than my hotel room cost.

I proudly consider myself a foodie. But I define “foodie” broadly: I’m simply someone who considers food an integral part of any culture — and any travel experience. On the other hand, I’m also thrifty, so splurging on a fancy meal doesn’t come naturally to me. I strongly believe that “foodie” doesn’t have to mean “expensive.” Some of my favorite culinary experiences in Europe have come with the lowest price tags, from grazing on street food in Palermo to my €25 day in Ljubljana.

And yet, a fine-dining extravaganza certainly deserves a place on the spectrum of foodie experiences. Here’s one traveler’s take on what it’s actually like to dine at a world-rated restaurant — designed to help you decide whether that experience deserves your time and money.

Finding, Booking, and Dining at High-End Splurges

Part of the fun of fine dining is doing your homework — figuring out which place deserves your splurge budget. I’m a devotee of Netflix’s exquisite food documentary series Chef’s Table — and after every episode, I’m ready to book a plane ticket. (Documentary Now! — also streaming on Netflix — did a genius parody of this type of foodie tourism.) And the Restaurant Magazine 50 Best Restaurants list has — among a younger generation of foodies — eclipsed Michelin stars as an indicator of the world’s best (or, at least, buzziest) eateries. Learning about a restaurant through these sources can make booking and anticipating a reservation a highlight of your trip preparation.

But that’s the first trick: Getting a table. Restaurants that are really hot book up many months in advance. If you have a place in mind, as soon as your dates firm up, check their website for the reservation policy. Many release blocks of reservations two to three months in advance  — and once they’re gone, they’re gone. It’s not unusual for foodies to set an alarm for midnight Copenhagen time, three months to the day before their visit, to try to book that elusive table.

So, your table is booked, and you’re ready to drop $200 per person on (what had better be) a life-altering culinary experience. If you’re like me, you may need to spend a little time rationalizing that high price tag. I’m not going to pretend I’m some sort of a bumpkin, but I must admit, until a few years ago, I was skeptical about fine dining. For a long time, I believed that once you reach a certain cost threshold for an upper-midrange restaurant (say, $40 or $50 a person), how could it really get that much better? At a certain point, you’re just throwing good money after bad. But a few recent dining experiences have changed my thinking.

On a trip to the Basque Country in northern Spain, my wife and I booked a table at what was, at the time, the “16th top-rated restaurant in the world,” Azurmendi. Driving through the verdant Basque hills to our midday reservation, we were debating whether lunch for two could really be worth a total tab of over $300 and several hours of our precious Spanish vacation.

But when we walked in the door, we began to understand that when you go to a world-rated restaurant, it’s not just a meal — it’s an experience. If you conceptualize this meal as part of your “food budget,” it’s outlandish. But if you think of it as an “experience”…well, that may be justifiable. We’ve spent $300 on other experiences in our travels, and felt it was a good value: prime tickets for a hit musical on Broadway or the West End, or a home playoff game for my beloved Denver Broncos, or a live concert of a huge-name musical act, or a sightseeing flight through Slovenia’s Julian Alps. And in an age where chefs are attaining celebrity at a level on par with rock stars and athletes…well, that’s what splurging is for.

As we arrived for our reservation at Azurmendi, we were invited into the leafy conservatory and given a little picnic basket filled with creative amuses-bouche.

Then, in the greenhouse, they showed us where some of the herbs and produce were grown; more amuses-bouche were creatively tucked among the plantings.

Then they took us into the busy kitchen, where an army of chefs and cooks — outnumbering the diners — were scurrying around with great precision, directed by the confident chef, Eneko Atxa. Observing this controlled hubbub, we were offered yet another amuse-bouche.

About 30 minutes and a light meal after we’d arrived, we were finally shown to our table. The rest of the meal was a fine experience, and taken together, that’s just what it was: an experience. I’ll admit it’s not The Best Meal I’ve Ever Eaten, but it was certainly one of the most interesting and entertaining.

Chef Atxa elevates Basque cuisine to an astonishing degree. Each dish was an adventure…an experiment in intensely focused flavor. Cauliflower, fried eggs, and truffle, composed like a surrealist painting. Natural spider crab, emulsion, and infusion — a super-concentrated taste of the sea that left my mouth tingling for several courses. Slightly spicy fried suckling pig and three Basque cheeses in three textures, which was…exactly as described.

Leaving the restaurant, we agreed that — assuming travel is worthy of the occasional splurge — it was $150 per person well-spent. And we certainly remember it more vividly than any other meal on that trip.

My favorite fine-dining experience took place in the remote Slovenian countryside, at Hiša Franko, owned by 2017’s highest-rated female chef in the world, Ana Roš. Ana was profiled on Chef’s Table, which we watched not once but twice before eating there. Imagine our delight when we walked in the door for our reservation, and there stood Ana herself at the maître d’ station. She took our coats, showed us to our table, and brought us bread, while we stuttered our greetings, star-struck and tongue-tied.

But that was just the beginning of a marvelous dining experience. Ana Roš lacks the theatricality of Azurmendi…but she doesn’t need it. It sounds like a cliché from a cooking-competition TV show, but over the course of her degustation menu, she achieved what every great chef aspires to: Through her food, she told a story about herself, and about the place she comes from. The progression of dishes felt like journeying through the pastures, rivers, and mountains of the Slovenian countryside all around us. Her food tasted like Slovenia. Her food could only be rooted in that place, and could only have been made by her. It was a culinary revelation the likes of which I have never had before, or since. And that’s why — for me, at least — it’s worth it.

Fine Dining for Dummies

I’m still new enough to this fine-dining scene to find its customs quirky and fascinating. If you haven’t experienced a fine-dining restaurant, let me walk through what to expect — tongue planted firmly in cheek.

On arrival, you’ll be greeted warmly and seated. Your purse even gets its own little stool. Everything operates with exacting precision, yet the pacing and atmosphere are insistently relaxed.

You’ll be handed a menu, but normally that’s something of a ruse. The choice is simple: Do you want the smaller tasting menu, the bigger tasting menu, or — at the finest places — the gargantuan tasting menu? I’ve never ordered anything but the smallest option, and I’ve never waddled out of a fine-dining restaurant anything short of full-to-bursting. I imagine the full-blown option would require serious consideration of the “boot and rally” strategy.

In addition to your food, you can choose whether to add the wine pairings. And if you’re going to commit to a top-end meal, just go ahead and do the wine pairings. A good, mid- to upper-mid-range restaurant stocks a nice variety of local wines, and the server can help you narrow down a glass or bottle to your taste. Well all know the rules of thumb: red wine for beef, white wine for fish. But a fine-dining restaurant takes things to an entirely different level. Your sommelier is a master at meticulously pairing wines to the nuances of each course, in a way that’s mutually beneficial to both wine and food. When properly paired, it’s nothing short of astonishing to take a sip of wine, then take a bite of food, then take another sip of wine — and see how much both flavors have changed.

The meal begins with a tiny appetizer called an amuse-bouche, which loosely translates as “palate stimulator.” (The plural is — and yes, I looked this up — amuses-bouche, which may be the most perfectly pretentious word I have ever come across.) The amuse-bouche is a sort of culinary overture — the chef is firing a warning shot across your taste buds about what’s to come. It’s a clever way for a talented chef to show off, while sneakily doubling the number of courses. While low-end high-end restaurants greet you with one amuse-bouche, the fanciest ones trot out a progression of a half-dozen or more.

By the time you make it through all of the amuses-bouche, you’re pretty much full. And then it’s time for the first course. Don’t worry — these meals usually span over three hours, sometimes four, so by the time the main courses arrive you’ll already have digested most of your amuses-bouche. Still…pace yourself, come hungry, and wear your roomy “Thanksgiving pants.”

Speaking of pacing yourself, let’s talk about the bread: Don’t fill up by gobbling the bread the moment it hits the table. This seems painfully obvious. However, it’s far more difficult than it sounds, because at a great restaurant, the bread is fiendishly delicious — spongy and warm inside, crusty and slightly charred outside. It is not an exaggeration to say that at more than one of the high-end meals I’ve had, the bread was one of the best dishes to hit the table. So we’re in agreement: Go ahead and eat some of the bread. Just…pace yourself, OK?

There will be a progression of courses. Sometimes you’ll have a list to follow along; other times, you’ll just take it as it comes. With each course, your server has prepared a brief lecture, explaining the ingredients, provenance, and technique represented. Cloches will be lifted with great ceremony, billowing rich-smelling smoke, and little teapots of broth will be poured over the dish at the last moment. Wait patiently until you’re sure it’s done. Then, only after she walks away, it’s safe to dig in.

A word about your server: You’re spending a lot of time together. And, without realizing it, you’ll slowly grow to be very fond of your server. He’s not just bringing you food, and scraping your crumbs off the table, and changing out your silverware from a little tray before each course, and deftly picking up your napkin with two forks held like chopsticks. He is your partner, your guide, your sherpa in this culinary adventure. He is your wingman.

You will like some of the courses. You will not love some of the courses. That’s OK. These chefs are in the business of pleasing, surprising, and sometimes challenging their diners. Barring real allergies or vegetarianism, I have an ethic of going along with whatever’s on the menu. In the hands of Ana Roš, even a raviolo filled with goat brain puree is unexpectedly delicious. Personally, I am not a fan of foie gras or sea urchin. (Yes, I realize this admission is severely damaging to my foodie street cred. What can I say? The taste buds want what the taste buds want.) But if a great chef wants to prepare it for me, I will try it.  And I will usually love it…usually.

As an aside, a phrase that I don’t hear nearly enough in everyday life is: “And now, we have an intermezzo before the final main course.”

Again, pace yourself. Thanksgiving pants. And, by the way, where does one buy one of those little crumb combs for the tablecloth?

At some point, probably late in the meal, the chef will appear from the kitchen and begin circulating among tables of star-struck foodies. This is like getting a backstage pass for a Springsteen concert. If you are familiar with the chef, be prepared to get flustered and say something stupid…or to stammer dumbly, saying nothing at all. If you have been dragged to this meal by a foodie spouse or relative, you will have no idea why this is such a big deal.

No matter how good the meal is, there is a moment of relief and accomplishment when you realize that you have finished the final main course. You made it! It’s all downhill from here. You always have room for dessert. (I have a relative who insists that, no matter how full she is from dinner, she has a separate “dessert stomach” that is always empty. You will need it.)

Another phrase I don’t hear nearly enough in everyday life is: “And this is a little pre-dessert…”

There is probably not one dessert, by the way. There are probably two, or three, or four.

And then, when you think you’re really finished, here comes yet more desserts: a tray of little sweets, sometimes accompanying coffee. They call these “petits-fours,” which is misleading, because there are usually more like six or seven.

So, if you’re keeping track — and if you count all of the little amuses-bouche and petits-fours and intermezzi, and, of course, that heavenly bread — a “five- or six-course meal” can be more like 20 or 25 different dishes. That’s worth some consideration in the big-picture analysis of whether it’s a good value.

When it’s all over, you’ll manage to disguise your shock when you glance at the bill, then pay it happily. That server that you have forged a bond with over the last three hours?  She’ll be getting an American-sized tip, if not a weepy goodbye hug. Then you’ll head out the door, somewhere between a waddle and a teeter (depending on whether you did the wine pairings).

So… Is It Worth It?

At the end of the day, that’s the real question, isn’t it? Can any meal really be worth such a huge investment?

My short answer: Yes. The longer answer: It depends…on the restaurant, and on the diner.

If you are a person who prioritizes food, in your life and especially in your travels…it’s probably worth it. If you can name more than five celebrity chefs (Guy Fieri doesn’t count)…it’s probably worth it. If you can conceptualize your meal as a “travel experience” rather than “food” (in the same wedge of the imaginary budget pie as scenic picnics and ice-cream cones)…well, then, it’s probably worth it.

If none of these applies to you, then maybe you should skip it. But don’t rule it out. Remember that ultimate foodie meal I enjoyed at Ana Roš’ Hiša Franko in Slovenia? My wife and I dragged my in-laws to that one. They were skeptical, but game to give it a try. And by the end of the meal, they were raving about the experience even more than we were. They even liked the goat brain puree.

If, on the other hand, you simply can’t afford it, that’s OK. Remember that there are reasonably priced alternatives. Again, “foodie” does not have to mean “expensive.”

Or….you could just stay in hostels, and let your taste buds travel first class.

40 Hours in Amsterdam: A Travel Writer’s Layover

What does a travel writer do on his day off? He just putters around Amsterdam, without an agenda, enjoying travel in its purest form. (And then, surprise surprise, he writes a blog post about it.)

That’s just what I’m doing on the way home from my guidebook research trip. After two busy weeks in Spain, and three even busier weeks in Sicily, I’m ready for a break. So, I figured, why not take a two-night, one-day layover in Amsterdam on my way home? That gives me exactly 40 hours to reacquaint myself with a great city.

There’s something liberating about returning to a city where you’ve already seen all the big sights. This isn’t a post about how to squeeze the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Anne Frank House, and a canal cruise into a hectic day of sightseeing. Instead, this is a post about how you can have a wonderful visit to Amsterdam, simply exploring neighborhoods that are missed by most visitors — entirely avoiding the tourist core, and never stepping through a turnstile. When a travel writer finally gets to turn off his data-collection feature, he finds himself simply going on a photo safari, strolling, browsing, and grazing. (Side-note: When I tell certain people I’m spending a couple of nights in Amsterdam to unwind after a busy research trip, I get a lot of knowing winks and rib jabs. “Yeah, I’ll bet!” But, in all honesty, I have zero interest in the illicit activities that are uniquely legal here. I just love Amsterdam. My friends back home will  back me up on this: I am a total square.)

Thursday Night

Arriving at my lovely splurge of a canalside hotel, Hotel Ambassade, around 9 p.m., I’m ready for dinner. I want something close, and something different — a change of pace after my steady three-week diet of pasta, seafood, granite, and Sicilian spleen sandwiches. Fortunately, right around the corner is one of Amsterdam’s top upmarket Indonesian restaurants, serving flavorful cuisine from the former Dutch colony. Kantjil & De Tijger, along the busy Spui corridor, is a once-trendy restaurant that has settled into its status as a reliable standard. Sitting outside as the sky gradually darkens at 10 p.m., I dig into the nasi rames — a one-plate sampler of flavorful Indonesian dishes, including sambal goreng kentang (shrimp and potatoes with spicy sambal paste), rendang (beef simmered in a sauce of coconut and spices), and saté babi (pork kebab). After dinner, I go hunting for bridges strewn with twinkle lights, reflected in a glassy canal. And, sure enough, I find some.

Friday Morning

While Amsterdam has a booming brunch scene, I stick with the excellent breakfast at my hotel —  reasonably priced when prebooked as part of the room rate. There’s no better start to a drizzly day than relaxing over made-to-order eggs and crêpes while gazing out over the picturesque Herengracht canal.

Leaving my hotel, I dodge wayward bicycles through a gentle rain, going nowhere in particular. I wind up following the exclamatory steeple of the Westerkerk, where I duck inside to avoid a sudden squall. The tranquil interior is filled with simple pews and soaked, poncho-clad tourists rubbing raindrops off their eyeglasses. The austere space is the polar opposite of the dazzlingly ornate Baroque churches in Sicily and Spain, where I’ve spent the last several weeks. Of course, as this was one of the flagship churches of the Dutch Reformation, that was exactly the point. Even the fancy organ has “modesty covers” that can swing shut to conceal its naughty pipes. Hiding out from the rain in this church, whose bells Anne Frank heard from her hiding place in the building next door, I’m reminded again why Amsterdam is such a delight.

I head back outside and circle around the church, following the gaze of a sweet little statue of Anne Frank to the Wil Graanstra Friteshuis, a handy spot for Vlaamse frites — Flemish fries, double-fried and served with a variety of sauces. I’m tempted to order a greasy cone of fries, but the rain picks up again, so I dash across the street and duck into one of the city’s ubiquitous Albert Heijn mini-supermarkets. Browsing with no intention of buying, I come across a display of make-it-yourself meal kits for mexicaanse burritos, italiaanse lasagne, and indiase curry madras…a clever Dutch spin on America’s current obsession with Blue Apron-type mail-order meal kits. I love stumbling on little slices of local life, even when I’m just trying to stay dry.

From Westerkerk, I delve into my favorite part of Amsterdam: the Jordaan. While this might seem like shameless product placement, I really do enjoy touring the Jordaan using the excellent audio tour on the Rick Steves Audio Europe app — taking me through this sleepy, photogenic, formerly working-class neighborhood where Amsterdammers still outnumber tourists. Rick and my colleague (and favorite writer) Gene Openshaw wrote the tour years ago, and it still holds up — offering an intimate look at a corner of Amsterdam most tourists miss entirely.

Friday Lunch

The rain begins to let up, and I head back toward the core of the city. A sudden sun break reminds me it’s actually summer, and I’m in the mood for an al fresco lunch…raindrops be damned. I make my way to Café t’Smalle, a classic wood-paneled “brown café” — a characteristic old Dutch pub whose walls are stained by decades (or centuries) of tobacco smoke. While the seating inside is traditional and cozy, I’m lured to the tipsy tables on a barge in the canal out front. It’s an ideal spot to canal-watch and munch a simple sandwich of aged Dutch cheese, shielded from the occasional fat raindrop by a generous canopy of leaves.

Heading south after lunch, I follow the Prinsengracht canal to dessert at IJscuypje, a local chain of ice cream shops. Flavors include the usual suspects, plus Dutch variations like stroopwafels (syrup waffles), boerenjongens (brandy-soaked raisins), and speculaas (gingerbread cookies). Biting into my speculaas cone, I remember one of the most mind-blowing discoveries in my many years of travels: that morning at my Amsterdam B&B breakfast table when I learned that they smash ginger cookies into an insanely decadent and delicious paste…and that I can buy it anytime I want, back home, where Trader Joe’s sells it under the name “Cookie Butter.” Soon after I got home, I learned a hard lesson: If you ever really want to put on some weight — and fast! — develop a taste for Cookie Butter. In this city notorious for its addictive vices, the one that really did me in involves gingerbread cookies.

Friday Afternoon

From the Prinsengracht, I go on a little aimless safari through another of the city’s most characteristically Amsterdam areas, the “Nine Little Streets” — a checkerboard of shop-lined, perfectly Dutch lanes connecting the Prinsengracht, Keizsergracht, and Herrengracht canals just west of downtown. While it’s billed as a “shopping area,” I’ve never spent a dime here — but there’s no place in Amsterdam I’d rather wander to reacquaint myself with the city’s unique cocktail of tranquil canals, skinny townhouses with fancy gables, manicured flower boxes, perfectly inviting cafés, and constant, fluid swirl of bicyclists rattling over cobbles with no helmets. Even the garbage bags lining the streets — awaiting collection — are arranged just so.

Heading east, I cut through the busy transit hubs of Spui and Rokin, traversing the touristy core of Amsterdam for the first (and only) time on my trip — providing a jarring contrast to the rest of my day. I realize that the Amsterdam I’m so enjoying gets entirely missed by many visitors.

But just a few steps from the tourist blight, I find myself in the sleepy zone around the University of Amsterdam. I detour a few steps through a fancy archway next to Oudezijds Achterburgwal 229, down the corridor housing the Oudemanhuispoort book market. The rustic tables lining the passage are piled high with secondhand books and art prints. Halfway along the corridor, I duck into a sunny courtyard where university students linger and chat — as if, like me, they’re regrouping from the stag-party chaos a couple of blocks away.

From here, I head east along Staalstraat, a lovely, narrow lane of classic Amsterdam townhouses and some of the city’s best window-shopping (including, at #7b, a wonderful design store confusingly named Droog, and at #17, the top-end local praline shop, Puccini Bomboni). In three short blocks, Staalsraat manages to cross over two entirely different — but equally distinctive — Amsterdam drawbridges.

Popping out at the far end of Staalstraat on Waterlooplein — facing the starkly modern opera house — I realize I’m starving…and I’m just a couple of blocks from one of my favorite scenic Amsterdam cafés: De Sluyswacht, “The Lock-Keeper’s House.” True to its name, it fills a standalone black-brick house from 1659 overlooking a busy intersection of canals in the heart of Amsterdam. I pull up a bench at a shared table and look out over the hubbub of boats big and small plying the brown waters, crisscrossing their way through the city.

For a snack, it’s a plate of the classic Amsterdam bar food, bitterballen — croquettes that have been double-fried to create a crunchy, almost prickly outer skin. The sun has finally decided to come out for good, and the whole city is out, enjoying the early inklings of summer. Dipping my butterballen into spicy Dijon mustard and watching boats scurry to and fro, I wonder why so many people think they need marijuana to enjoy Amsterdam. Sure, come for the marijuana…but stay for the bitterballen and canal views.

Feeling those bitterballen weighing heavy in my stomach, I head back to the hotel for a brief rest. Why am I so tired? I realize it’s because simply walking down the street in Amsterdam is exhausting. You have to keep your head on a swivel, as cars and silent bikes whiz past you constantly, forcing you to jump at a moment’s notice onto the little brick median teetering between the road and the canal. In my 40 hours in Amsterdam, I’ll see at least three or four near-miss accidents — mostly involving tourists (on foot or on bike) who didn’t realize that they don’t always have the right of way, simply by virtue of being from out of town. Dutch cyclists are kind but firm, and will set you straight quickly if you wander in front of their oncoming bike. (You should hear the friendly jingle-jangle of a handlebar bell as if it were a foghorn.) Just as I’m pondering this, I see a Dutch cyclist pull to a stop and — again, kindly yet firmly — point out to a jetlagged tourist family that their toddler is toddling straight toward a canal.

Friday Night

After resting up, I head out in the early evening for a 20-minute walk west — beyond the Jordaan — to one of Amsterdam’s newest foodie hotspots: Foodhallen, Amsterdam’s foray into the European trend of jamming a world of eclectic eateries under one roof. Filling a red-brick former tram depot with shared tables, Foodhallen is ringed by two dozen different food stands, representing a rainbow of cuisines: Basque pintxos, dim sum, Hawaiian poke, tacos, sushi, bitterballen, Mediterranean mezes, Indian wraps, wood-fired pizza, steaming ramen, gourmet burgers, high-end hot dogs, and much, much more. After doing a couple of laps to survey my options, I settle on a plate of chicken-and-corn gyoza and a steaming shumai dumpling with pork and mushrooms. Squeezing into a free seat at one of the hall’s countless shared tables — all of them jammed full on a busy Friday night — I realize that I could have a dozen different meals here, and probably enjoy each one equally.

After dinner, I walk back toward the center, detouring along bustling Rozengracht to catch the 8:30 comedy show at Boom Chicago, Amsterdam’s answer to Second City.  Since 1993, comics including Jordan Peele, Seth Meyers, and Jason Sudeikis have cut their teeth on Boom Chicago’s stage, in English-language sketch and improv shows skewering current events on both sides of the Atlantic. For this show’s audience, savvy, worldly Amsterdam natives seem to slightly outnumber American tourists — all of them laughing in unison at the easy pickings generously provided by the Trump Administration.

Stepping out of the theater to find it’s still light out, I go looking for a canalside nightcap. Drawn once again — like a mosquito to a zapper — to the Westerkerk spire, I find myself back in the Jordaan. At another characteristic brown café, Café de Prins, I nurse a drink at an outdoor table, with a view of the Westerkerk and of a steady parade of well-dressed Amsterdammers rolling by on their bikes as they text on their phones and smoke cigarettes.

Saturday Morning

Determined to make the most of my fleeting few hours in Europe, I follow canals about 30 minutes south to the neighborhood delightfully named De Pijp (“deh peep”), where I stroll the thriving Albert Cuyp Market — several blocks of open-air vendors selling foods, flowers, clothing, housewares, antiques, and more.

The Albert Cuyp Market an easy and enjoyable place to assemble a progressive breakfast. There are pickled herring stands, if that’s your poison — choose between “Amsterdam-style” (chopped up on a bun, with raw onions) or the more adventurous “Rotterdam-style” (pick up the intact filet, dredge it in onions, and lower it delicately into your open mouth).

In the mood for something a little less…aggressively flavorful…I follow my nose to a stand selling poffertjes — tiny, puffy Dutch pancakes cooked on a special griddle. Each one is about the size of a semi-deflated squash ball, sprinkled with powdered sugar. Delicious.

As I wander, I check out many other tempting foods: roasted chicken sandwiches, a hummus bar, an array of Dutch cheeses, roasted nuts, and more.  But the one thing I can’t resist is a hot stroopwafel. Neighboring Belgium is famous for its big, fluffy waffles, but here in the Netherlands, they prefer a thin, crispy wafer…or, actually, two of them, sandwiching a layer of caramel syrup. You can buy stacks of stroopwafels in any shop, but they’re best when warmed up — hot and gooey. I don’t really feel like I’ve been to Amsterdam until I’ve had a stroopwafel. I’m getting this one in just under the wire.

Back at my hotel, I pack my bag in a hurry — determined to squeeze in one last culinary adventure before my flight. Around the corner from my hotel, I’ve spotted a hole-in-the-wall shop called The Lebanese Sajeria, specializing in the Middle Eastern wrap sandwich called a manoushe. I line up and place my order, then wait patiently on the sidewalk as the busy chef delicately lays each flatbread on the dome-shaped griddle in the window until it’s cooked just right. Finally, my name is called, and I find a canalside bench to bite into my wrap. The flatbread is warm and crispy, wrapped around a generous layer of the spice and sesame seed mix called za’atar, along with a layer of spiced ground beef.  It’s hot, delicious, explosively flavorful, and the perfect end to my mini-break in Amsterdam.

Hopping into my Uber, I know that I’ll be back to Amsterdam soon. This city exerts a strange magnetism on any traveler who simply enjoys exploring. Best of all, in two nights and one full day in one of Europe’s most touristy cities, I’ve managed to almost entirely avoid the tacky parallel world that most tourists never leave. If you’re going to Amsterdam just once in your life, of course you should check out the Rijksmuseum, the Anne Frank Museum, and the Van Gogh Museum. But also carve out a little time to putter around the city’s concentric canals. find a cozy café in the Jordaan, snap a twilight photo of a canal at 11 p.m., and munch a manoushe or a poffertje.


Most of the places I visited are my favorite discoveries from past trips — and are included in our Rick Steves Amsterdam & The Netherlands guidebook… although, because this was such a short trip, I brought along the more compact Rick Steves Pocket Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is particularly well-suited for audio tours. Through our Rick Steves Audio Europe app, you can download Rick and Gene’s tours of three different neighborhoods: the Jordaan, the city center, and the Red Light District…all entirely free.

Palermo, Sicily: Italy’s Street Food Mecca

In the midst of a chaotic market bustle, on a gritty back street of Palermo, Marco is an anchor of calm. “Now let’s begin,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye. “Do we have any volunteers?”

Marco, who runs Streaty food tours, has spotted an opportunity to get his group precipitously high on the Sicilian-street-food learning curve. Following his gaze, I spot it, too. It’s a little, wheeled cart — about two centuries old, from the looks of it — topped by a big wok, filled with mystery meat.

Being a “volunteer” on a street food tour is high-risk, high-reward. But I’m in Sicily to experience Sicily. (And to work on our new Rick Steves Sicily guidebook, helping out Rick and co-author Sarah Murdoch.) And today, it’s all about weird foods. So I raise my hand.

The vendor grabs my upraised hand, flips it over, and lays a little square of tissue paper in my palm. He proceeds to pile it with hot, gelatinous…something. It’s from an animal — presumably deep, deep inside the animal — but beyond that, I’d hate to guess. My stomach sends a few trembles down my arm to my hand, jiggling the mystery meat as the vendor spritzes it with fresh lemon juice.

And then I taste it. And…it’s not bad! It’s nice and salty, generously seasoned with pepper and bay leaf, and goosed with the zip of lemon juice. The seasoning makes it. The texture…not so much. It’s like chewing on sauteed gristle.

“This is frittula,” Marco says. “It’s basically the leftover parts of veal — cartilage, intestines, little bits of bone — all chopped up and fried together. What do you think?” The members of our group bold enough to sample it nod in agreement. The others look a little green.

A gregarious Palermitano, Marco has a knack for making this challenging city appetizing for visitors. And now that he’s lined our guts with a baby cow’s, we’re about to plunge into the street market.

“This is one of three big outdoor markets in central Palermo,” Marco explains. “It’s been here for one thousand two hundred years. And it has not really changed in all that time.”

We walk past tables piled high with the sea’s bounty: big fish, small fish, tiny fish, shellfish. Occasionally, guys circle around and fling handfuls of water from cheap plastic buckets onto the styrofoam containers.

But it’s the soundtrack that really marks this experience as Palermo. The fishmongers shout about the freshness of their wares with a singsong cadence that’s a holdover from the Arabs who turned Palermo from a  humble village into a thriving metropolis. Walking down the narrow aisles, being nudged aside by vintage Vespas, it’s a cacophony of sales pitches: “Tutta fresca! Tutta fresca! Tutta freeeeeeeesssss-caaaaa!” one of them shouts in my ear as I walk past. “Prego-prego-prego-prego-prego-prego-preeeeeeeGO!”

Marco explains that there are three ways to buy your fish: You can buy it whole, and process it yourself. You can ask the fishmonger to prep it for you, to suit the recipe you’re planning. Or, if you’re short on time, some fishmongers will shop around for you, buying all of the ingredients you need for your recipe. Just call ahead, then drop by later to pick it up. It’s sort of a low-tech, Sicilian Blue Apron.

For this reason, people prize their relationship with their fishmonger. They become extremely loyal — close friends. And if you get sick, your longtime fishmonger may even deliver to your home. Marco says, “My mamma has told me she’s going to leave me two things when she passes on: Her house. And her list of market vendors.”

We walk past a marble slab with a gigantic half-fish, lying on its side, exposing a tree-stump-sized cross-section of vivid-red flesh. “Aha! Tuna season has just begun.”

Little bunches of mint lie next to the fish. Marco explains that the mint — a fresh, young, tender spring herb — indicates that it’s the very beginning of tuna season. Later in the season, when the tuna is almost finished, they’ll put out chrysanthemums — a sign to shoppers that their time for fresh tuna is running out.

Fresh tuna is a huge deal in Sicily. “Freshness is important, because we like to eat it almost raw. You know bistecca alla fiorentina?” Marco asks, referring to the famously super-rare Tuscan T-bone. “This is like tonno alla fiorentina — sear it just 30 seconds on one side, 30 seconds on the other, and finito!”

“But it’s not just the steaks. We think of tuna as the ‘pork of the sea,’ because we use every part…except the fins. The heads are used to make fish soup. We even dry out the roe, and then sprinkle it on pasta — that’s called alla botarga.”

Next to the tuna is strung up a swordfish — its head suspended from the canopy, to make it clear what a fearsome beast the fishermen have managed to pull from the deep. Standing over the tuna and swordfish cadavers, the fishmongers sharpen their comically oversized knives with the ear-piercing sound of metal on metal…and a glimmer in their eye as if daring me to take their picture.

Greengrocers have their own top-of-their-lungs sales pitches to brag about how their produce is both incredibly fresh and, somehow, also incredibly cheap. Tectonically speaking, Sicily has one foot in Africa — and it grows tropical fruits that thrive in few other corners of Europe. Sicilians love to brag about their domestic mangoes.

And even for more conventional produce, Sicily is the garden patch of Italy. The market bursts with bright-purple eggplants, plump tomatoes, and distinctly Sicilian zucchinis, three feet long. I watch a prospective zucchini buyer pick up the vegetable and swing it around a bit, demonstrating how floppy it is. “Eh, terrible quality. I’ll pay half!”

Someone asks Marco whether vendors here are honest. His answer threads the needle delicately. “Sicilians have a…special way of interacting with each other. First of all, we don’t just speak Italian — we speak Sicilian. We learn Sicilian not in school, but in the streets. So if you talk to someone in Sicilian, they’ll give you the local price. If you talk to them in Italian, or in English, you get a special price. Maybe a euro more.” When he explains it so matter-of-factly, somehow it just makes sense.

“And there’s a kind of…what I would call ‘gamesmanship’ at the market. Not just with tourists or outsiders, but among Sicilians. Sure, sometimes maybe a vendor will try to cheat you in some way. It’s almost expected. But if you figure it out and come back to confront him, then he respects you for it. He’ll give you something free to make up for it. Even some Sicilians really don’t like this way of operating. I have relatives who won’t come to the market — it’s exhausting for them. For others, it’s fun. Kind of a game, a challenge.”

Marco points out a sign, where the 9’s have tiny little tails. “From a distance, those look like zeroes — oh, just €1.00 for a kilo! Not bad. Only when you get close do you see it’s double — €1.99.”

We reach our next snacking stop: giant deep-fried rice balls. “What do you call this?” Marco asks. I’m one of the know-it-alls who blurt out the answer: arancino, of course! Marco clucks his tongue and jerks his chin up sharply — a definitive, Sicilian no. “In Catania,” he says, practically spitting on the ground as he mentions Palermo’s rival city on the east coast, “they call it arancino. Here in Palermo, we call it arancina — feminine.”

The Catania-style arancino— similar to what you’ll find in most of mainland Italy — is rice, tomato, veal ragú (meat sauce), mozzarella, and peas. But here in Palermo, they do it differently: Instead of tomato, an arancina is flavored with bright-yellow saffron…yet another artifact of the Arabs who built Palermo.

Slicing into a steaming arancina, the bright color pops. This is one of those foods — like croissants piping hot out of the oven — that’s infinitely better when fresh. I’ve had a lot of forgettable arancini that were cold or microwaved. But there’s nothing in Italy more delicious than a hot arancino (ahem, arancina): burn-your-fingertips, crispy outer shell; soft, warm, and gooey rice inside.

Next up: Another classic Palermo street food, two deep-fried treats that are usually served together: panelle e cazzilli. We stop at a characteristic stand, where the two vendors — colorful as cartoon characters — are engaged in a neverending banter with their clients and passing tourists.

Marco gets his plate of panelle e cazzilli and gathers us around for a lesson. Panelle are flat chickpea fritters. With some imagination, a panella is shaped roughly like a fish fillet — to stoke the fantasies of the poor Palermitani who ate these to fill their bellies when they couldn’t afford actual fish. Biting into a panella, I can really imagine pretending this is fish-and-chips.

“Well, the one thing that poor people could afford,” he clarifies, “was sardines. And not fresh ones — the poorer you were, the longer you had to wait to buy the sardines…as the price dropped. So by the time you got them, they were already nearly spoiled. That’s why a very traditional Sicilian dish is pasta con le sarde — pasta topped with sardines, pine nuts, fennel, and raisins…to aid digestion.”

“And of course, pasta con le sarde is sprinkled with breadcrumbs. Anything in Sicily that’s prepared alla Palermitana comes with breadcrumbs. This also comes from poverty: Poor people could never afford to grate fancy cheeses over their pasta. But they could sprinkle on salty breadcrumbs from yesterday’s leftover bread.” One century’s hardship food is the next century’s defining culinary style.

Back to the other half of the deep-fried dish: cazzilli, which is a slang term for the male anatomy. These little elongated croquettes are filled with mashed potato, mint, and parsley. Because of their respective shapes, and because they’re often eaten together, panelle e cazzilli are sometimes called “husbands and wives.”

Leaving the market and wandering through town, we come upon a pretty square in front of a Baroque church, with another nondescript food cart out front. Inside the glass case are stacked sickly-looking hunks of french bread with a pinkish topping.

“These are sfincioni — sometimes called ‘Sicilian pizza.’ It comes from an Arabic word for ‘sponge.’ The traditional one does not have cheese or other toppings — just tomato, and one onion. Then they sprinkle it with black pepper and oregano. That’s all. Simple.”

Noticing our skeptical looks, Marco says, “I know, I know. These do not look appetizing. But what you don’t realize is that he has a little oven inside the cart, where he can grill up the sfincioni before serving them. And that makes all the difference.”

We watch the vendor stick his sfincioni into the cart, wait a couple of minutes, then pull out a deliciously toasted snack. It’s flavorful, with a nice oregano zip, a little char on the bottom, and just the right amount of oily. Who knew? (Marco knew.)

Continuing down the tight lane into another market area, called Vucciria, we pop out at an impossibly ramshackle piazza, ringed with food carts. This part of town, close to the port, was decimated in World War II bombings, and some buildings were never rebuilt. Still, the area hosted a thriving street market…until recently.

As more Sicilians are doing their shopping at modern supermarkets, some traditional markets — like this one — are struggling. However, this area is enjoying a new life as a hotspot for food stalls and after-hours cocktail bars. Little “for sale” signs hang from apartment balconies — like flags of surrender flown by homeowners ready to vacate their newly rowdy neighborhood.

One little stand serves octopus. That’s it — just octopus. A small octopus (not much larger than your hand) is boiled in salty water, blackened by ink. When ready to eat, the critter is fished out with a hook, roughly chopped into little chunks of tentacles, and spritzed with a wedge of lemon. And that’s polpo bollito…boiled octopus. The name says it all. If you like the taste of octopus, and savor the flavor of the sea, it’s heavenly. If not…skip it.

At another vendor, a glass display case shows off all manner of meat strung out on skewers. Nearby, a hissing grill kicks up a rich and flavorful smoke. The vendor is chopping up juicy wands of spring onion, then wrapping them in thick strips of bacon. It’s called mangia e bevi: “eat and drink.” Tossed on the grill, the smell is heavenly. I suddenly realize that summer barbecue season is just kicking off back home, and I’ve got a new recipe to try… (However, I’ll pass on the other variation, stigghiola, which is intestines wrapped around spring onion.)

But the star of the show is the stall that sells Palermo’s ultimate “gross street food”: pani ca’ meusa — spleen sandwich. Marco introduces us to the vendor, who has served this grease bomb to an illustrious array of celebrity chefs and travel TV personalities from around the world. He fires up his big wok, drops in a hunk of lard, and then stirs in chunks of organ meat.

“They call it ‘spleen,'” Marco explains. “But actually, it’s mostly lung.” Marco, you’re not helping.

“Not everybody likes the taste. It does taste like organ meat. If you don’t like liver, you may not like it. However, it’s not as strong as liver. But for many Palermitani — including me — this is the most delicious street food we will try today.”

The vendor lays strips of sizzling organ meat onto the pillowy bun, spritzes it with lemon, and hands the sandwiches around. Now, I have a rule that I am willing to try any food…once. And so, swallowing hard, I take a bite. And…

It’s just as Marco described: A milder version of liver. It’s deliciously salty and pleasingly greasy — which helps it slide down. Some bites feel like thinly-sliced, gristly meat. Others are more chewy and sinewy. And, after about half a sandwich, I’m equal parts pleased with myself for giving it a go…and ready to call it quits.

Looking around the busy Vucciria market, it strikes me that this is one of those rare spots where grizzled locals and adventurous tourists coexist harmoniously. Here stands a little scrum of curious street foodies. And across the square are a pack of Palermitani just hanging out, like they do every day. A big guy pulls up on a little moped and idles while he chats, spewing exhaust onto the tourists nursing drinks at their plastic tables. He greets the grillmaster with a long handshake and a tender kiss on the cheek. They wave their arms in conversation, before he buzzes off down a grimy street, and his friend returns to his grill full of guts.

Only one thing’s left on this food tour: dessert. And there are few more enticing places for dessert than Sicily.

On my trip to Sicily, I’ve quickly become a connoisseur of granita — a sweet, refreshing, icy slush that suits this hot climate perfectly. In mainland Italy, gelaterie sometimes have one or two flavors of granita on the side. But here in Sicily, things get more creative. They have limone, of course, but also maondorla (almond), pistacchio, gelsi (mulberry), fragola (strawberry), and many, many others.

My favorite is caffè. A robust, dark-brown granita di caffè, with a few little bits of coffee beans mixed in, is my go-to alternative to an afternoon cup of coffee. Insanely refreshing. Pay an extra €0.50, and you can get it con panna — with whipped cream — turning it into something resembling a frozen latte. (For the record, my favorite granita di caffè in Palermo is at Lucchese, a venerable old-time café and pasticceria facing the square of San Domenico.)

Sicilians enjoy granita for breakfast, often stuffed into a brioche bun. But I like mine straight. If a place has constantly spinning granita machines, skip it. The best granite is kept in metal bins with lids, so the vendor has to stir it around and scoop it out. If you get real granita — which has a thicker consistency — you can even combine flavors. If you order pistacchio and caffè, a savvy clerk will layer the powerful coffee flavor on the bottom, to avoid overwhelming the more delicate pistacchio.

On Marco’s tour, however, he’s chosen to give the people what they want: cannoli. To reward us for all the offal we’ve been consuming, he takes us to a spot that has his favorite cannoli in town.

There are two secrets to a good cannolo: First, you don’t fill the deep-fried pastry tube until you’re ready to serve it. If you fill it earlier in the day, then stick it in a display case, the pastry casing gets soggy and loses the textural contrast that makes this treat special.

Second, the cannolo has to be filled with quality ricotta cheese. You’ll see them made with all sorts of tourist-pleasing variations (pistachio creme, chocolate creme, vanilla custard, Nutella, and so on). But a pure cannolo has a sweet yet tangy filling of fresh ricotta. The cannolo is dusted with powdered sugar, and sometimes they throw in some candied fruit, nuts, or chocolate chips.

Eating this cannolo in the shadow of Palermo’s cathedral is like eating cannolo for the very first time. It’s just one of many delicious memories I’ll pack home from this journey through Sicily…and my trip is just getting started.


Our new Sicily guidebook — with all of the details about Palermo street food, and much, much more — is available now.

In other blog posts, I wrote about my top 10 tips for traveling in Sicily, the challenge of driving in Sicily, and a stop-by-stop rundown of the ultimate Sicilian road trip.

We also have a wealth of free Sicily content on our website, including a recommended itinerary, links to two new episodes of Rick’s public television series about Sicily, several interviews from Rick’s public radio show about Sicily, more gorgeous photographs, recommended books and movies about Sicily, and much more.

And if you’d like to visit Sicily — but would love it if someone else did all the driving, took care of the hotels and half of the meals, and explained it all to you — well, then, we have a great 11-day tour for you.