There might not be a lot of foreign travel happening right now, but some of the most memorable meals my family and I have had through the years have been while traveling abroad.
From rijsttafel in Amsterdam, and pollo al forno around the corner from the famed Cavern Club in Liverpool, to steak-frites and secret sauce in Paris, and risotto in the Lake District of northern Italy, my family has brought back many dining stories (and delicious memories) from our trips.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
One of the most unusual meals we’ve had in another country was during a 1984 visit my wife, Leslie, and I made to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. A guidebook talked about the influence that the colonization of Indonesia had on Dutch cuisine, and recommended tourists try rijsttafel, which means “rice table.”
What we were served was a big bowl of rice and lots of little bowls of different spicy-sticky-sweet dishes. We enjoyed the meal, but, frankly, we weren’t sure what we were eating most of the time. However, that may have been a good thing. We do remember beef rendang (slow-cooked, crispy beef in coconut curry sauce) and pisang goreng (crunchy fried banana fritters).
Credit: Olivia King
Credit: Olivia King
Easily the most unusual meal any of our family has had was when our daughter-in-law, Jenny, was working at a school in South Korea, and the teachers and administrators went out to dinner. The school’s principal ordered san-nakji, and offered her some. She didn’t want to try it, since it is a live octopus dish, but refusing food is considered bad manners there, so she accepted.
One of the teachers mimed to her that she should chew it really hard. “That was the opposite of what I had planned to do, since it seemed the easiest way to get through it would just be to swallow it as soon as possible,” she said. “But, I’m glad I listened, because I later read that it is rare, but possible, to die from the suckers attaching to your throat!”
She used her chopsticks to pry the suckers off, since the octopus leg was still wiggling and sticking to the plate. “I chewed it hard,” Jenny said. “It didn’t have much taste, or else I didn’t notice the taste, because it was sucking onto my cheeks. I eventually chewed it enough that it stopped sucking, and swallowed it. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I think I earned some respect from my colleagues for trying it!”
Credit: Olivia King
Credit: Olivia King
Another unusual meal: a “jacket potato” (baked potato) that our daughter, Olivia, had at the Cwtch Cafe in my mother’s hometown of Abergavenny, Wales. It was topped with baked beans, which might sound awful, but she said it “spoiled me for jacket potatoes now — I can’t enjoy them plain.”
Memorable settings have made several meals abroad special, including the time Leslie and Olivia dined at the Sorza restaurant on the Ile Saint-Louis in the Seine River in Paris. Olivia said of the pesto risotto: “I would have licked the bowl if that was acceptable in public.”
Credit: Olivia King
Credit: Olivia King
They also visited the very popular Le Relais de l’Entrecôte in Paris, which has a set menu: steak-frites and secret sauce. The boneless steak is covered with an alarmingly green peppercorn sauce, Olivia said, but it was “one of the top meals of my life, thus far.”
On our numerous trips to the U.K., we’ve had a lot of fish and chips, of course. The most generous portions were at The Codfather in Abergavenny (featuring a logo of a tough-guy fish toting a machine gun), while the best-tasting were the hand-battered Atlantic cod and chips at the Pen & Parchment, a 17th-century inn in Shakespeare’s hometown, Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Credit: Olivia King
Credit: Olivia King
Another traditional U.K. meal is roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, which Olivia ordered at the Sherlock Holmes Pub and Restaurant in London. It was very good and, unlike what you’ll get in many British homes, the roast beef wasn’t overcooked!
On a solo visit that our daughter made to the U.K. between college degrees, she had afternoon tea at Chatsworth House, a grand estate owned by the Duke of Devonshire that was used for the Pemberley scenes in the Keira Knightley film of Olivia’s favorite book, “Pride & Prejudice.”
Credit: Olivia King
Credit: Olivia King
Livvy also got to celebrate her 23rd birthday in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. Her birthday is March 1, St. David’s Day, the Welsh national holiday, so she got to march in the parade and then enjoy lasagna made with Welsh beef at the Duke of Wellington pub.
Probably the most memorable mealtime view we’ve had was in northern Italy’s Lake District in 2009, where dinner every night at the four-star Lido Palace hotel offered a majestic vista of Lake Maggiore.
Credit: Olivia King
Credit: Olivia King
The two-hour, four-course meals (five, if you wanted a salad) included such starters as cauliflower muffins, and a tartlet with squash, leeks and taleggio cheese; a different cream soup every night; and a different pasta, except the last night, when we had risotto, one of the area’s specialties. Each night, you also had the choice of fish (usually from one of the nearby lakes) or meat, for your entree, along with some sort of potato dish. Our favorites included the eggplant and Parmesan lasagna al ragu, the veal escalope, and, our farewell meal there, trout with butter and sage.
One night, a strawberry and vanilla cake topped with a sparkler was wheeled out to celebrate the birthday of our 24-year-old son and a lady in our tour group. Young Bill got to slice the cake.
Credit: Leslie King
Credit: Leslie King
And, always, gelato of various flavors was part of the dessert buffet.
In general, the food at the hotel — and in the various restaurants where we had lunch, including pizza just down the lake in Stresa — was wonderful, especially the simply prepared pasta (usually in oil and a light, creamy tomato sauce, not the heavy sauces favored in southern Italy). Zucchini was a frequent ingredient, as was eggplant.
When Olivia did a study-abroad stay in Rome in 2014, her most memorable meals included a pasta dish at La Fiaschetta (she liked the place so much, she ate there four times); and cacio e pepe served in a bowl made of Parmesan cheese.
Credit: Olivia King
Credit: Olivia King
Of course, you can find fine Italian cuisine in other countries, with one of the best meals I’ve ever had being at Casa Italia in Liverpool in 2001, when my son and I both had the pollo al forno — shell pasta, chicken and mozzarella in bechamel sauce, sizzling hot in a skillet and sprinkled with Parmesan and black pepper. Delicious!
Seafood always has been a favorite of ours, too, and a favorite spot was the now-closed Geales in Notting Hill, where, on our last visit, we had cod and chips, whitebait (a small battered, fried fish), salmon fish cakes, fried plaice fillet with new potatoes, and fish pie (with cod, prawns, salmon and smoked haddock in cream sauce, topped with mustard mashed potatoes).
Credit: Jenny Robb King
Credit: Jenny Robb King
Our son and daughter-in-law had another memorable seafood meal in Barcelona, Spain, where they signed up for a class to learn to make paella mixta, which also includes chicken and vegetables. “A big part of the work was chopping veggies,” Jenny recalled.
They enjoyed sangria while the paella cooked in a large round pan, and, for dessert, they learned to make a Catalan cream, similar to a crème brûlée. Said Jenny: “It was one of our favorite meals and experiences in Spain!”
Credit: Olivia King
Credit: Olivia King
We’ve also had some unforgettable servers during our foreign meals. When we met up with some longtime friends at the Pavement Cafe in the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, we had a terrible waiter, who was so bad he apparently got fired midway through the meal!
On the positive side, the day after my son and I dined at Liverpool’s Casa Italia, we got a taste of the famous Liverpudlian wit when we returned for lunch. The waiter we’d had the night before recognized us and, with a grin, asked if we’d like our “usual table.”
Credit: Olivia King
Credit: Olivia King
Another meal, at the Angel Hotel in Abergavenny, featured not just delicious food (including a dessert combining strawberries, vanilla ice cream and sugar cookies), but also a charming French waitress, who managed to talk me into trying something called Jasmine Pearls. It proved to be a delicious green tea scented with fresh jasmine flowers, and I enjoyed it, in spite of my doubts.
And, in 2014, we returned to a London restaurant called Olio, in a hotel near Hyde Park, where, 13 years earlier, we’d enjoyed a wonderful Italian meal. Unfortunately, in the interim, Olio had switched to a European-Malaysian menu. When we expressed our disappointment, the waitress, who hailed from Turkmenistan, convinced the management to serve us from the Frank Sinatra Night Italian menu one of their other restaurants offered just one night a week.
We appreciated the effort — and, of course, she received a very generous tip.
Read more tales of memorable meals abroad at Bill King’s Quick Cuts blog, billkingquickcuts.wordpress.com. He can be reached at junkyardblawg@gmail.com.
