![]() A lively conversation followed, involving staff and other diners, and I left with several recommendations for further eating, and the pleasing sense of having been, ever so briefly, among friends. Asking locals where they go out to eat opens up neighbourhoods not normally on the visitor’s radarĪs I was quietly finishing a bowl of cassoulet at Toulouse’s Marché Victor Hugo, an older man at a neighbouring table enquired solicitously if I’d enjoyed it – “because I couldn’t help but notice it looked a bit dry”. It’s a universal language, especially when you have no shared vocabulary, as happened when we joined a table of Hong Kong pensioners for Sunday morning dim sum, and delighted them with our enthusiasm for fried duck’s tongues.Īnd an interest in food means you’ll never be short of something to talk about, even when you’re eating alone. While I don’t just travel to eat, it’s always a reliable shortcut to intimacy with a culture. Exploring the city’s history through its cuisine – rice and spices from the east, salt cod from the frozen north and strudel from the years under Austrian rule – proved far more pleasurably educational than listening to my friend Rick read out endless pages of the guidebook. Equally, while I know our student trip to Venice must have taken in St Mark’s Square, two decades on I can only conjure an image of cuttlefish in ink as dark as a Tintoretto devoured in a hidden trattoria (startling to callow youths expecting pizza and pasta). T hough I have a photograph of me standing on the Great Wall of China, my sole memory of the visit is the noodles I had for lunch in a truckers’ cafe afterwards.
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