Tag: italian food

Postcard from Trieste, Italy: Flavors on northeastern edge of the Adriatic

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Vintage Italian postage stamp featuring red apples on a branch with green leaves.

Above: Squid ink paccheri pasta with shrimp and sun-dried tomatoes at Radici

On the northeastern edge of Italy bordering the Adriatic Sea and approaching Slovenia and Croatia, we’d expected the food to deviate more from the Italian dishes we were accustomed to. We were pleasantly surprised. We sampled only a handful of restaurants during our stay in Trieste but hope these photo reviews help you if you travel that direction.

We entered Ego Ristorante from a petite passageway on a rainy afternoon so didn’t even realize there were outside tables on a heavily trafficked pedestrian street on the other side. On the other hand, swarms of tourists huddled under umbrellas passed by without a clue of the small handsome interior space where we sat warm and cozy.

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Postcard from Padua, Italy: Pairing vini and cicchetti

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A colorful Italian postage stamp featuring a bottle pouring wine into a glass surrounded by grapevines.

Above: Frascoli Bacaro

Let’s start with a bacaro. A bacaro is a food stop offering cicchetti with wine where it’s perfectly acceptable to stand around chatting while consuming both.

Cicchetti? Think tapas or pinxtos. A wonderful social concept, but I really prefer to consume a pleasant lunch sitting down. And the bacaros we sampled in Padua met that desire well.

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Postcard from Istanbul, Turkey: ‘Mea culpa,’ admits a wine-swilling trespasser

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Above: Racks of wine inside Beyoglu Saraphanesi

A full wine rack in a restaurant in Istanbul became a welcome site for determining where we would eat. If you are a teetotaler, dining options are more plentiful with much lower price points.

Of course, this makes sense. Ninety-nine percent of the population in Turkey is Muslim, a religion that bans the consumption of alcohol. Intoxicants are viewed by many as “abominations of Satan’s handiwork.”

This doesn’t mean you personally are forbidden from partaking; it means that those of us with a certain type of thirst must work to locate restaurants willing to pay the high license fees to offer beer, wine and cocktails. With its Muslim majority, Turkey’s steep sin tax receives high approval ratings. Why not tax those foreign visitors clogging your streets and your young people who already are over-influenced by western culture?

…travel, is flight and pursuit in equal measure. It is both the desire to leave home and the passion to find something new, to pick up stakes and discover who you are in a different landscape and culture….

You are both somebody and nobody, often merely a spectator. I always felt in my bones that wherever I went, I was an alien. That I could not presume or expect much hospitality… that wherever I was, I had no business there and had to justify my intrusion by writing about what I heard. Most travel… can be filed under the heading ‘Trespassing.'”

“The Hard Reality American Expats Quickly Learn,” Paul Theroux, New York Times, January 5, 2025

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