obscure2k

There have been times in Italy when I really want a club sandwich, burger or a tuna sandwich on toast.
I know where to find a Thanksgiving dinner in Venice. Would appreciate suggestions for food other than burgers , etc.

PWMTrav

I know you said other than burgers, but one of the best burgers of my life is consistently from the Mercato Centrale in Florence. They really do a nice job with the seasoning, good bread, nice toppings.

Florence has a couple of Chinese spots that might do the trick - both on Via dei Neri. Beijing8, which is an international chain, and Dim Sum, which is a local option. I can't speak to the former, other than walking past it a bunch, but the latter is well-regarded by students in the area.

I'm not sure how much this counts, but La Mangiatoia is half restaurant, half takeout rotisserie in Florence - walk through Piazza Pitti, stay on the left side of the road, and you'll find it. Really good option if you want a chicken and some sides to take back to the apartment because the kids are tired and don't want to go to a restaurant.

I'm not sure about Rome. In the interest of full disclosure, I rarely tire of Italian food, so all of the above is driven by the demands of others in the family When we need a break from sitting down to eat, the first option is usually the grocery store.

obscure2k

My husband loves a properly prepared BLT. Every ingredient has to meet certain standards: Toasted bread, preferably sourdough, at least 4-5 slices of very crisp bacon,(American bacon) good mayo, ripe tomatoes, crisp lettuce, side of fries and washed down with Coca Cola. The fancy hotels, e.g. Hassler and Gritti tend to put too many accoutrements, such as hard boiled eggs or substituting Canadian Bacon, pancetta or proscuitto. . My suggestion if craving an American BLT, is Hard Rock in Venice. Great sandwich and great view of the gondola parking lot just outside of San Marco. It is interesting watching the tourists queue up while waiting for the gondoliers to return from their lunch. The Hard Rock alcohol beverage prices are completely crazy! BLT is not.

PWMTrav

That's a good one. American-style bacon isn't very common in Italy. Everything else is available at most grocery stores, even the smaller city locations. I have noticed a huge uptick in Italians drinking soda - particularly Coke - over the past few years. I'm not a soda person, so I really noticed the change.

mromalley

Are you looking for ethnic food ie sushi and Indian or North American type food?

obscure2k

Sushi, Middle Eastern, Indian....It is all on the table. With the bounty of seafood in Venice, I do not recall seeing sushi or sashimi.

Perche

Just a few years ago there was only one place that served non-italian food in Venice and that was a small chinese place in Campo Felipo e Giacamo. Now, there are two others on the other side of the Rialto Bridge, as well as a sushi place. Visitors from china are one of, if not the largest tourist group of Tourists to Venice. Seven years ago I went to the only Chinese restaurant for for a break after 3 months in Venice, and it was terrible, full of MSG, gave me a headache. It was so salty that I was thirsty for days. Later, I was told that they serve different food off of different menus for chinese and caucasians, selling the latter what they think chinese food is. I've seen two additional chinese restaurants on the other side of the Rialto Bridge in San Polo. And they do the same: your food will be different, based upon your origin.

I know of at least three sushi places, including one in San Marco and one in Cannaregio. I'd be leery about them. In the USA there are very strict rules about how to handle raw fishserved as sushi. Right after being caught it has to be flash frozen (it can't be cooked obviously, but a deep freeze equally kills all of the parasites.

There was an article in the paper in the USA where they sampled the DNA of the sushi in a large number of sushi restaurants in LA over a period of four years. DNA analysis revealed that much of the time the sushi in Los Angeles was fake. The halibut and red snapper were not those species, they were almost always some other, cheaper species. Ten percent of the salmon in sushi restaurants in Los Angeles wasn't even salmon. It was other fish dyed to look that way.

About 75% of the yellowfin tuna wasn't yellowfin tuna. Ninety percent of the time halibut was actually flounder, a very inexpensive fish.

If that can happen in LA, I hate to think of what can happen in other places. Once I became seriously, bed-ridden ill from eating salmon sushi in Torino, Italy. A professor told me, "Non mangia salmon mai a Torino!" Meaning don't ever eat sushi in Torino! Apparently, getting sick is not that unusual. http://time.com/4633426/fake-sushi-food-fraud/

I haven't seen an indian restaurant in Venice, but they are all over in the Monti district in Rome.

Italians don't really understand the concept of eating other food. It feels like dressing up in a sari or kimono. They feel they already have the best food in the world, so why eat second rate food (although they have been known to faint when they walk into a supermarket in the USA). I'd like to reiterate that there really is no such thing as italian food. The food differs widely from place to place. There are many dishes that people eat in Siena that the people in Florence, 100 miles away, have never heard of. There's no such things as fegato alla venezia in Florence, and there is no bistec fiorentina in Venice. I had bigoli e salsa last night in Venice, or thick spaghetti with sardine sauce. You can't find that in Palermo.

In Palermo they eat sandwiches made of deep fried spleen, but not in Rome where they eat deep fried brain, whereas in Venice the closest you're going to get to something like that is eating liver. The concept of there being a monolithic thing called Italian food comes from Italian American food, which has very little similarity with Italian food.

I've heard people from NYC say they like the Italian food in New York better than the Italian food in Italy! That's because they have never eaten Italian food!. Even the names show how distant four generation removed food that "great grandma used to make" is from the food in Italy. In Italy, there is no such thing as lasagna. You would order a plate of lasagne.

In english, a word is transformed into the plural form by adding an "s." In Italian, most words end in an a or an o. To make them plural, words ending with an a are changed to end with an "e." In Italy, if you ask for lasagna, technically, that means that you want the waiter to just bring you one noodle of the past cut in the shape of a wide ribbon, which is the shape of a lasagna. If you want a plate of multiple strips of lasagna layered with sauce and cheese, you are not eating one strip of lasagna, you are eating a plate with multiple strips, so you are eating lasagne. If it's spelled lasagna on the menu in Italy, you should reconsider eating there. And no matter how it's spelled, if it's on the menu in Venice, you shouldn't eat there, because Venetians don't eat lasagne. Lasagne is really from Bologna.

And if you see spaghetti bolognese in Bologna, you shouldn't eat there either, because that's another thing that doesn't exist. Ragu sauce is never served with spaghetti. The noodle has to be wider, like tagliatelle. Just like you wouldn't order one strand of taglatella, you want a whole bowl of a lot of it, so you ask for tagliatelle. It's the same principle with not asking for a single piece of lasagna, you ask for lasagne.

As for USA style food, I suspect you'd have to go to a hotel where they would have an international menu, or to a chain like Hard Rock Cafe, McDonalds, or something like that. It's unthinkable for an italian restaurant to serve non-italian food.

Actually, as immigration has increased there are a number of Italian cities that actually ban ethnic or foreign food. Florence bans it from the historic center (although grandfathering of older restaurants is forbidden). The beautiful town of Lucca in Tuscany bans chinese restaurants and kebab shops, and now it says that to preserve its food tradition, all foreign food is banned.

Milan has started to ban foreign food. To some extent, this is backlash from cheap products. Olive oil from Italy has a great reputation, and is expensive, so a lot of fake Italian olive oil was being smuggle in from Tunisia, Greece, and elsewhere, ruining its reputation. Truffles from Piedmont and Umbria are the best, but then a thriving smuggling operation of cheap truffles from China started. Since food is integral to Italy, backlashes against ethnic food exist.

Verona is in the part of Italy where polenta is eaten, as least as often as pasta. They were alarmed with the number of kebab places turning up, and even the number of places serving southern italian food, which is often fried, so they banned kebabs, gyros, and even Sicilian fried food because it is heavily influenced by Arab culture. This was part of a, "Yes to Polenta, No to Cous-Cous" movement.

Even the mayor of Venice, which has not banned foreign food, is quoted as saying, "We don't even know where the food is coming from, which makes it difficult to reconcile with our history, and frankly creates discomfort."

If you really want ethnic food in Italy, it's not that easy. There are a fair number of kebab places in Naples, but I've never seen a hamburger place. There are Indian and kebab places near Rome Termini. There are a couple of Ethiopian places like Mesob in Rome that is actually pretty good, and is the best place to look for ethnic food, outside of a large hotel catering specifically to tourists. There are a few mexican food places in Rome, and one in Torino, but being from California and having lived on the border with Mexico in Texas for four years as well, I can say that isn't Mexican food. In Italy, you're pretty much stuck with regional food, e.g., venetian pasta with bigoli, seppie, etc. In Bologna pasta with ragu, etc., and lots and lots of meat.

mromalley

In Rome (Monti) - I can recommend
Indian
Sitar on Via Cavour
Daruma - Take out type Sushi- it's on the corner of Via dei Serpenti and Via Baccina

Japanese - Doozo - it's a restaurant and art book store on Via Palermo

KLouis

Well, the remainder of your post is 100% correct, except for this sentence.

First of all, it's not smuggled but legally imported, and then it's sold (illegally) as Italian olive oil.

Second, bad oil mostly does not come from Tunisia and Greece but from the surplus Spanish oil (often a year or two after harvest) and, yes, bad Italian oil (this also exists) is usually exported overseas. The Italian Oil industry is rather clever. For the local market they import cheaper but good oils that meet the Italian taste and reserve the bad oils (own or imports) to those they think they will never taste the difference. By the way, many people in Italy say that the olive oil industry is in the hands of organized crime throughout the country.

As a matter of fact, I've extensively spoken with experts (i.e. profs at Agricultural Faculties and high ranking officers at the Umbria Dept. of Agriculture) when, about five years ago, we were submitting a large research network proposal to the EU to develop a fool-proof methodology allowing the detection of Italian oil falsely labelled as DOC/DOP (currently, in spite of urban myths, this is not possible on large scale. These people also supported the idea that the bad Italian oil was the biggest threat to the good Italian oil.

Finally, now that Xylella fastidiosa has started ruining the production of olive oil in the Salento (and soon anywhere else), Italian oil companies spend even more on importing oil if they want to still be able to sell good quality stuff to the local populations. The spread of X.f. northwards is, unfortunately, not far away in the future as the bacterium has already reached Southern France and Corsica as well as the Balearic islands (Greece, the Iberian peninsula and North Africa are still free).

Perche

You're right on a number of levels. Perhaps the best Italian olive oil is from Puglia, where XF has cause terrible destruction. The University of California at Davis, within its Department of Agriculture, has an Olive Oil Institute. In addition to research, you can become certified as a taster. While I've never taken a course there I've attended some lectures. One of the main teachers is an olive oil expert from Rome. I took two classes with her. Without hesitation she and others strongly recommended not buying olive oil from Italy because of the fraud. The only exception would be if you really, really know how to "read between the lines" on the label. The olive oil situation in Italy is a mess.

There are two good reads. One is a book called, "Extra Virginity," reviewed here in The NY Times: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/12/0...il-review.html

The book is an outgrowth of a major investigative journalism article he wrote for New Yorker magazine that is a spellbinding read called Slippery Business: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...ppery-business

KLouis

All of the 20 Italian regions produce olive oil, whereby for 13 of them, this constitutes a major economical undertaking (97% of total production). The fact remains that both in Italy and the remaining oil producing areas of the world, the locals insist that their own oil (own: country-region-commune-local area-piece of land) is by far the best of the world. It is impossible to describe and categorize using laboratory analysis the taste of any given oil, and the only criterion used throughout the world is the so-called acidity. For example, I remember as a child that Athenians didn't like Cretan oil, they found it too "strong". Needless to say that Cretans found their oil excellent.

Now, having been an experimental scientist for the last... 44 years, I only believe what can be proven, and in this case an experiment was conducted: Over that same period, the olive varieties used for oil production were gradually changes such that, nowadays, less than 5% of the trees carry the fruit of yesteryear. Interestingly, if you ask the average cretan, (s)he is unaware of this and (s)he maintains that the taste is still the same like always. On the other hand, Cretan olive oil has now become one of Athenians' favourite and none of them will say it is too "strong".

While I lived in Perugia I used to bring my own oil made from the 25 trees in my garden. The reason was that I didn't want to spend months till I could decide which one of the local ones to buy. As a matter of fact, after having been to several good Umbran restaurants (they all serve local, non-industrial oil for the guests) I decided that (most of) their local oils were very similar to my own. I guess we use the same variety, harvest very early, etc.

Perche

Forgive me, I normally change my ATT SIM for an Italian one. This week i have a lot to do with business in the USA so I didn't make the change so that I could use the $10 per day USA rate. Be warned: it butchers the language. I know how to do the language switches, but you still have to override most of it. I had to rewrite every line of this page using the ATT service. My last post has a huge American interest of errors that I rewrote.

Sciamano

The olive oil thread is simplier than you all said.
Unfortunately nowadays the majority of the bottles you find in the supermarket have a big label with an Italian flag but if you go gloser you'll read some like this "this oil is the result of EU mixed olives that has been pressed (don't know if it's correct) in Italy" or in the worst case "produced in EU". And in this last case the Italian flag is only referred to the company that probably has of Italian has only the name.
In any case, if you buy extravergin olive oil (NOT from an industrial company) and the price is lower than 7€/lt...maybe there's something wrong with that oil (not extra but simply vergin, not Italian olives, sold without a receipt and so on...).