Travel

Like my ancestors before me and their great ancestors before them, I like love food. The members of the Santiago clan aren’t known for being particularly picky about their cuisine. Eat first, ask later (or ask while eating). But eating anything in China is like a blindfolded taste test. The labels are written in Chinese, so I sit and I poke and I prod.

While I come from a long line of low maintenance eaters (and pride myself for it) I still must inspect the mystery meat that is tossed onto my personal safe haven of choice, white rice. Just because it looks like beef, photographs like beef, and is doused with similar sauce does not guarantee beef.

However, there comes a point in every young adult’s life, where you realize your budget restraints, stop questioning and start eating. I’m not saying I gave in to eating turtle or even chicken claws for that matter, but like the Donner party would have said, “When I’m starving, I will eat almost anything”.

Lunch is promptly at 12pm every day. Like any daily activity, it is a large, public game of charades in which I act out what I’m thinking, the Chinese guess, and occasionally someone bilingual steps in to finish the job. 2 words! Hot? Cold? Hot Tea? Two Sakis? Hot Water? Ice Water? Ding ding!

Unfortunately, this isn’t foolproof, but, in general, I've discovered that China has great food. Especially, if you trust a native Chinese foodie to lead your American taste buds in the right direction. Here is a mini-guide to my food adventures thus far:

I admit it. I eavesdrop. I love it, but sometimes I end up a buttinsky. I start chatting with random people in a restaurant, and it’s so transparent that I have been leaning way far over in order to hear it all. One time, in New York, I overheard a first date. They met on Match.com. Two middle-aged people (pushing 70, so maybe not middle age) were having a conversation and the cuckoo bird woman was telling her date she was a princess in some obscure country no one has heard of. I’m not kidding. I wanted her to go to the bathroom so I could tell the guy to make a run for it. And it was SO none of my fucking business. And yet, I continue this pursuit even though the hearing is now diminished in my right ear and I have to be seated just so in order to overhear everything.

I’ve been in Quebec the past week and can’t often eavesdrop because everyone is speaking French, damn them -- and me for not learning the language. But, the other night I did spend a great deal of time totally engaged in other diners’ conversation. We were in a small room, three tables of families. The middle table asked the couple by the window how long they’d been coming to Gibby’s. I perked up because hey, it was in English. Apparently, the couple drove many miles, from Laval, to come to this small village, Saint Sauveur, as did the family in the middle who came from Saint Agathe. They agreed it was a wonderful experience and worth the drive. Then the conversation went into a whole boring part with questions from the middle table about the window table’s drilling business. Don’t you hate when other tables’ conversations get boring?

“We’re sliding smack dab into the inevitably expensive tourist trap,” you say as the taxi driver curses and swerves through the gridlocked traffic of Ipanema Beach’s main drag Avenida Vieira Souto (with its famously geometric-patterned sidewalks) and onto the narrow traffic-choked streets of the city.

Your destination was suggested by our hotel’s concierge whom you had asked for a suggestion for authentic Brazilian food. You were hoping for a cozy hole-in-the-wall filled with smoke, grumpy locals and slow waiters.

The restaurant, Porcão – which you immediately translated to Poor Cow – was just the opposite of that. Poor Cow was all you feared, expensive and a tourist trap (adding to the blah decor was a wall-size TV playing a silent futbol match), exactly like those places that have popped up all over major U.S. cities where frantic waiters bring huge stumps of grilled meat to your table, where they slice off chunks in perpetuity until you feel as if you’ve ingested a small cow. But you were hungry and jet lagged and needed to get out of the hotel or you would have gone right to sleep only to wake up in the middle of the night, hungry and jet lagged. You felt like a bad tourist, but the outing served its purpose and besides, you have something special to look forward the next day – Cook In Rio – a one-day cooking class at some lady’s house in Copacabana that you had found online. An authentic Brazilian experience was promised and this time you are not disappointed.

New York’s Café Buloud is a divine restaurant, and it is nearly impossible to order an ordinary meal. We were there the other night – our feast before the simpler joys of summer in Martha’s Vineyard. Saltimbocca Alla Romana was on the menu. Oh Boy! I haven’t seen that on a menu in years! What we received was delicious - stew sized chunks of veal in a thick, dark brown sauce with sweetbread tidbits and a small piece of prosciutto off to the side as an afterthought.

A few tiny green specks, which I fantasized to be sage, were stirred in the gravy… Delicious but disappointing! Time to go back to the 1960’s and a summer spent in Roma living in my painter’s studio just off the Piazza del Popolo, where Marcello Mastroianni would come for his espresso and we all lived La Dolce Vita! “Living” meant buying groceries in the Italian style – Every morning, going from shop to shop fingering the produce, chatting up the butcher, and bargaining in Italian.