Dining in Italy comes with a hefty side order of rules.
Food is a hugely important aspect of Italian culture, and eating in the bel paese has its own set of customs. Deviate, if you dare, but you risk being called out online or accosted by a wildly gesturing torch and pitchfork bearing mob (okay, maybe not quite, but you’ll probably be judged, teased, or even refused by your server).
If you come from a country where anything goes, these customs can be a bit puzzling, but in Italy, milk is for breakfast and babies, pineapple is for dessert (not pizza), and pasta shapes are deliberately paired with certain sauces—and that’s just three rules of many! If you want to eat like a local on your trip to Italy—or simply avoid rejection and ridicule—read on.
I just got from being in Italy for a month. I started out in the Lake area, Piedmonte, Sardinia and ended up in Sicily. I had only one subpar meal and that was a restaurant at the hotel Villa Athena in Agrigento. It was not an "authentic meal" but instead catered to foreign travelers and offered a conglomerate of European cuisines. Not only was it the most expensive meal I had, it was a major disappointment. Everything else I ate, sticking to the specialties of the region, was GREAT!
That dull Italian food is coming with a lot of provisos. Just came back from yet another region in Italy and the cuisine is still unimaginative. Maybe they should start doing proper cooking for a change rather than worrying about pointless etiquette?....
Amazing! I visited more of Italy than the average Italian, cities, towns and villages, been taken/recommended to restaurants/trattorias by the locals and all that time these were just tourist traps!? Blimey, trrapping tourists must be Italian speciality? Or perhaps there is more to cooking than just boiling pasta and slapping mono-flavoured sauce on it and grilling plain meat/fish? Hey, I'm having BBQ tonight with some fresh salad - I must be "cooking" Italian! Sadly, the salad has more than two ingredients in it and will have salad dressing on it!......