Roman eating habits

Hello everybody,

In my second blog post I’d like to talk about culture-bound misunderstandings concerning food. Who would’ve expected any of them to happen in Italy, the paradise for food lovers? On my trip to the amazing capital city during the Easter Break I had to find out that there was still a lot about Italian eating habits that I hadn’t heard of before.

Who cares about breakfast?

The first problems already came up when we were looking for breakfast. We were staying in a very nice B&B and since the word ‘breakfast’ is mentioned in the name we’d of course expected to get a filling breakfast there. Well, they offered breakfast, but because it only consisted of a Croissant and coffee, we decided to look elsewhere. The B&B was located in the center of the city in an area with many little, charming cafes and bakeries. After having looked for paninis or any other kind of bread in almost all of them without any success, we had to accept the fact that it is simply not common in Italy to have a proper breakfast. You could see people everywhere in cafes standing at the counter sipping their ‘espressi’. The only food some of them would have to go with the coffee was a croissant.

I’m not the kind of person for whom a croissant is a filling breakfast. Anyway, the ones you get in Rome are heavenly. I’d never noticed that this type of pastry was so popular among Italians. You can get them in all variations. The ones I liked best were those with pistachio filling. Even at McCafe offers at least five different types.

Red or white?

Not only the search for breakfast but also getting dinner sometimes was challenging for us. The first problem we had was that at the time we started looking for a nice restaurants where we could get the pizza and pasta we’d been waiting for, all of them were still closed. Well, that’s something we could’ve known. Unlike Austrians Italians simply don’t eat dinner before 9 o’clock.

Once we were sitting in a restaurant, ordering wine and starters went surprisingly well. Also when I ordered my pizza Frutti di Mare I thought there could be nothing wrong about my order. I was a bit disappointed when I got it because the only seafood on it were a few shrimps. Well, no reason to complain. Only when I took the first bites of my dish I thought it didn’t really taste like a pizza. It didn’t look like one either. It was too light. Then I realized that the chef must’ve forgotten to put tomato sauce on it! Since I’m not a person who likes sending back dishes, especially not in a foreign country because you can never be sure about local eating habits, I continued with my bread and cheese. When the waiter came to clear away the plates I asked him whether the tomato sauce had been forgotten. He burst out laughing and told us that you don’t get a pizza with tomato sauce unless you order a ‘red pizza’. Otherwise you get it ‘white’, the way my pizza looked like.

These were only two examples for a lot of facts that surprised me about Italian eating habits. Anyway, Italy is a country where you just can’t stay hungry.