20/05/2023, 16:50 The key to an unforgettable holiday?

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The key to an unforgettable holiday? Just focus on
the food
Discovering a great local place to eat is often the highlight of a
trip and a way of understanding a culture
35 of Europe’s best restaurants

Felicity Cloake
Sat 20 May 2023 07.00 BST

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. 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

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cuttlefish in ink as dark as a Tintoretto devoured in a hidden trattoria (startling to

callow youths expecting pizza and pasta). 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.

While I don’t just travel to eat, it’s always a reliable shortcut to intimacy with a
culture. 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.

And an interest in food means you’ll never be short of something to talk about, even
when you’re eating alone.

Asking locals where they go out to eat opens up neighbourhoods not

normally on the visitor’s radar

As 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”. 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.

Indeed wherever you are in the world, people are usually only too happy to open up
to you about regional specialities – sometimes, if you get really lucky, they open up
their homes too. Driving around Iceland a couple of years ago, I found it very easy to
admire the scenery, but more difficult to engage with its few inhabitants, until I went
for lunch at the Brimslóð Atelier guesthouse in Blönduós on the north coast. As chef
Gísli Egill Hrafnsson deftly prepared the fish (local cod, naturally) in his home
kitchen overlooking the grey Greenland Sea, I was able to quiz him on important
subjects not covered in the National Museum, such as, how do you get to sleep when
it’s light 24 hours a day, and what do you do if you happen across a stray polar bear?

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The writer eating fondue at Le Cellier in Les Deux Alpes

It pays, of course, to look beyond the most obvious dining options. In the Croatian
islands, my eye was caught by a ragged flyer fluttering near the ferry terminal,
advertising dinners at a farm up in the hills, so I booked, attracted by the chance to
see beyond the touristy coastal strip. Not only did we come away with a two-litre
plastic bottle of their wine, but we got a lift from town in the back of a pick-up with a
bouncy little terrier, which I enjoyed almost as much as the slow-braised octopus
that followed.

Asking locals where they go out to eat also opens up neighbourhoods not normally
on the visitor’s radar. Forget the pub opposite the British Museum offering
“London’s best fish and chips”; Knight’s Fish Bar in West Norwood, with its picture
of a young Queen Elizabeth tacked to the wall above the saveloys and pickled eggs,
is less than an hour away by bus – get a seat on the top deck and you get a cheap tour
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of south London to boot.

The memory of the food – and the special foodie places discovered – is often the
highlight of a trip, what really connects us to a place. That competitive fondue eating
with friends at Le Cellier in Les Deux Alpes, or the punchy little noisette (espresso
with hot milk) at Trattoria des Pistoles in Marseille’s maze-like Le Panier quarter,
surrounded by the sights and sounds of everyday life, are snippets in time I cherish.

So you can keep your fancy hotels – frankly, I’d always rather spend my money on
food.

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