Category Archives: Travel

Stuff to take with you…

Autogrill

Driving in Italy can be stressful. People drive fast. City driving is not recommended. Restrictions on city centers driving make it a lost cause. But… I love driving along the highways and the Auto Stradas. I love stopping at the Autogrill places. This past month I drove with a friend of mine from Rome to Ortisei, high up in the mountains of the Dolomites. And in between two funny things happened. My friend was driving. He ran out of gas. And there we were on the bush stretch of Auto Strada and we had to call in for a tow to the Herat Autogrill gas station. We were 6 km away. But it took a while for the guy to show up and then we remained in the car while he hauled us onto his tow truck. Was quite an adventure watching the world go whizzing by us while we sat in the car on the tow truck as it poodles along enroute to the gas pump. A funny experience.

Anyhow on to my next point. These Autogrills are quite a phenomenon. They sell everything. From the regular auto stop necessities like coffee and a sandwich to the spectacular. It’s a full on delicatessen, a fabulous self-serve restaurant with amazing regional dishes and clothes and toys and anything you may have forgotten on the road. We saw 4 trucks of firefighters from Romania buying the place out as they were heading home. It’s a supermarket with fabulous food. And the prices are amazing. Each Autogrill has different specialties depending upon the region. Oh. And you can get gas there too! Thank goodness! 😅

In my travels I love stumbling on the unusual places that don’t necessarily fit into a regular itinerary. Recently while driving through the Dolomites area I got to see the beautiful towns of the Sufvtirol. The Sufvtirol was formerly part of the Austrian Hungarian empire. In a classic land grab after the First World War, Italy apportioned itself the Austrian border towns and created the region Sudtirol. It’s a wealthy beautiful area. The unusual Dolomites with their rust colored dramatic rock towers above beautiful valleys and the largest prairie in Europe. The alpe di susi. In the winter it’s a skier’s paradise. In the summer the lifts keep rolling and skiers are replaced by walkers and bikers. The Dolomites are wide open unlike other alpine ranges. Lots of sun and places to stay on the high mountains. The food is very different. A mix of the best of Austrian and Italian. Wines are very good. Especially the whites. The local delicacies like speck, a type of prosciutto, and the delicious cheeses plus a whole variety of pasta makes this one of my favorite culinary stops. Towns like Bolzano and Ortisei and the glitzy Cortina are a short distance from Venice or Verona.

Dolomites, Italy

Fish and Chips

I travel a lot. Always Friday night. It’s strange because when I was a kid, every Friday we had dinner from the fish and chip shop down the road. The sign outside read Frying Tonight! It was a weekly thing. Wrapped in newspaper, greasy and delicious with lots of salt and malt vinegar. The tradition of fish and chips stretches back to the 19th century. Origins are cloudy but it looks secure that it was both a Lancashire dish and an East London staple. Sephardic Jews brought the dish to London, and poverty and the sea brought the dish to the north. Oldham they say! Chips were cheap. Hence the saying. Cheap as chips! And deep fried was tasty and transformed boring potatoes into golden delicious hot salty delicacies. Cheap fish was used. Haddock or Rock Salmon. Nothing to do with Salmon. 

During the second world war, food shortage was challenging, and everything was rationed. Except fish and chips. And so, it became a staple of the diet in Britain. Nobody really loved fish, but coat with batter and deep fry it with chips thrown in and cut the grease with vinegar and then pour salt over the lot.  Now you’re talking! Is it any wonder that the Brits got a bad rap on food. Nowadays, its trendy. In cool and chic restaurants fish and chips with mushy peas is a staple! Considered still to be the consummate dish of the British Isles. Voted each year the most famous institution in England after the monarchy! Long may it reign! 

Tiramisu

There is believe it or not, a World Cup Tiramisu tournament in Treviso each year. Now in its 6th year it has two categories. Original and creative. So, I guess gold medals for two which seems fair.  They say Treviso is the birthplace of the dish. Invented by Alba Campeol in the early 1960’s from her restaurant Le Beccherie. Inspired by a breakfast recipe of egg yolks and sugar (zabaglione) with espresso it was a sort of energizer to start the day. It literally means “pick me up from down” and I often wonder why people prefer to have it as a dessert that is guaranteed to keep you up all night. It’s probably because it’s so simply delicious and in restaurants it’s easy to prepare and store.  So…Best Tiramisu. Better with with alcohol but not mandatory! Egg yolks and sugar folded into whites with marscapone. Savoiardi or lady fingers then soaked with espresso and rum and decorated with grated chocolate. 

It’s one of two desserts I always choose. The other is crème Brûlée. But I would say it prefer the Italian to the French!

Coming Up for Air

I knew the pandemic was nearly over because my local bakery in Boston, in Seaport called Flour, finally opened its doors fully after a year and several months of operating at 10 per cent.  I can recall the early pandemic days when none of us were quite used to the world that was about to hit us.  Numbers were pitching badly, the pandemic was crippling everything from restaurants, bars, schools, flights, trains…everything closed…..and somehow Flour had limped through.  As had we.

I used to go there pretty much every week at least twice.  Orders had to be made online, sandwiches and stuff left in between the glass doors, no contact, just a wave to familiar faces that worked there.  And then slowly it became easier.  Not perfect, but accessible.  Still nothing inside but a few more people and some lovely conversations with the always lovely staff there. And then it happened.  There was a crowd.  A queue and it was busy, and I had to wait a little longer and there were people hanging inside and eating outside and then I realized, that the weathervane had changed.

The pandemic was moving on.  People in the streets, at ball games, less masks and smiles you could see again.  And then I knew we would be back traveling soon.  So, maybe not the French café in my favorite neighborhood by the office on the Rue Cherche Midi, maybe not my hangout in London in Soho or the Piazza Della Rotunda by the Pantheon in Rome.  Not yet, but getting there.

Imagining a world less remote, less tied to zoom.  The sounds of flights overhead filling the sky a little more each day.  I can feel the pull of travel as countries start to open shop . Travel is what we do.  What we all need to do.  Out of the backyard and into the neighbor’s yard.  A jump once more into another place.

And there was Flour.  Busy and bustling and looking half normal.
I loved my sandwich today!  Always have, but today felt super good.

Pete

London in Darkness: The Holiday Season

Let me just say that I love London in the winter time. It is dark for most of the day and it rains on and off every single day. If you are traveling during the winter (or even summer), make sure that you arm yourself with a decent mini-umbrella that you can tuck in your bag. Essential. The weather changes all of the time. I guarantee you will always need to reach for that umbrella.

London is unlike most cities in the world during the holiday period. It just simply goes for it. Lights are everywhere and not just in the shops…they are on miles of streets that populate the center of the city. It’s not even that the Christmas tree is the main focus, although traditionally there has always been a beautiful tree in Trafalgar Square opposite the National Gallery. It’s really the lights on Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly, and Covent Garden that takes your breath away. There are thousands and thousands of people rushing around from shop to shop and pub to pub, hopping on double deckers, jumping into cabs, and pouring into the Tube. It’s cozy and it feels so intimate.

The neighborhoods all have their own decorations and their own ambiance.  In the West End, the bustle of the restaurants, theater, music, ballet, and museums, seem to move into high gear over this period. My favorite neighborhood is always Soho. It even has my favorite hotel, the Dean Street Townhouse, and my favorite restaurant, the Dean Street Brasserie. I like to keep things geographically simple!

“Maybe its because I’m a Londoner, that I love London town!”

How Can You Not Love New York City?

I like New York City a lot, and although it’s not my favorite city, I do appreciate its amazing museums and grand theaters.  I love the neighborhoods that stretch all the way from the Battery to the Bronx and the new Brooklyn, unrecognizable to my wife now who went to Bayridge High School and grew up a stone’s throw from the Verrazano Straights.  New York has a busyness to it with its big, broad avenues, and trying to catch the pedestrian lights as you walk so you don’t need to stop and can just zig zag your way from 30th to the park. I love Soho and the Village and always wondered where I would live (probably Soho although the park is stunning).  So my question on New York is why is it so ratty in places?  London can be patchy and the outskirts of Paris are dreadful, but we are talking downtown New York City.  It’s very uneven to me.  Fun, but dirty, and even the late-night scene is sketchy.

My favorite restaurant in the city is Esca.  I love this place – great seafood, nice wine list, but honestly, it’s stuck in the seediest part of town on 43rd Street and 9th Ave, next to porn shops and dodgy quick bites.  It’s weird, New York.  The transportation hubs just seem to be seedier than they need to be.  Grand Central is a beautiful station but it’s confusing.  The shops and kiosks around it are grim.  Penn Station is even worse and is surrounded by dodgy hotels.  Yet here in the thick of it is Madison Square Garden.  Let’s not forget to mention LaGuardia Airport, antiquated and inefficient, with no great transportation link into town.  Welcome to New York.  

So, yeah, I do like New York for two days, grab an overpriced play and go out to a nice dinner, but in the end, no prejudice, London is just a cooler place.

 

What Do You Love About Telluride?

I had a credit from the Hotel Madeline in Telluride, CO.  They were kind enough to roll the credit from a canceled reservation a year ago over to a new reservation this year.  So my son and I hit Telluride.  I had never been before although I had heard lots about it.  We both love to ski so this seemed like a perfect storm.

Getting to Telluride is not easy.  It’s more or less impossible to drive from Denver (6 hours) so a flight to Montrose Airport is the usual way in and that’s what we did.  Montrose is a strange place.  One hour and a half drive from Telluride, it couldn’t be farther.  There is a great diner there, Starvin Arvins, where the eggs and corn beef hash are exceptional.  The waitresses all wear pumps and the clientele can look very different to us folks from the eastern territories.  Not more than 20 minutes from Montrose is Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.  The canyon is as deep as the Grand Canyon but not as wide.  It was spectacular in the early morning mist to see this giant chasm in a national park right next door to a very bland, modern town like Montrose.

An hour and a half later we arrived in Telluride. The town is really two towns. Mountain Village is essentially the new town.  It’s built along the lines of all American ski resorts with plenty of large fire pits, bars, and fake old new buildings.  However, it was functional and had great access to the lifts.  The Hotel Madeleine was right there – literally just a hop to the lifts.  We were taking advantage of my credit.  Actually, the hotel itself was a bit of a standout.  It had a nice pool, although not big enough to do lengths in, fabulous twin outside jacuzzis, a great steam room, and a slightly overpriced breakfast buffet.

There is a gondola that serves the new town and the old town.  It runs from early in the morning to midnight.  You can ski off at the midpoint or simply use it as public transportation between the two towns.  I loved this facility.  It’s also free and paid for by the state of Colorado as a form of public transportation.  I always think of great moments in travel like the Venice motor launch in from the airport.  This was one of those moments.  At the end of the day just before sunset, we would ride the gondola down to the old town.  Telluride is high up at 13,000 feet so these trips were spectacular and the ride down was thrilling every night.

I really loved this place.  Loved the old clipper mining town and the restaurants down there.  We ate well every night and the tacos at Taco Del Gnar are cheap and amazing.  There was an Italian restaurant close to the gondola that was good but not standout.  But everything was amazing every night especially Rustico and 221 South Oak.  At the top of Telluride, there is a fabulous place to break up the day called Alpino Vino.  It’s the highest restaurant in North America at 13,000 feet.  On a sunny day in the right place and a great table, you can see forever.  Telluride has a population of 2,000 people, seven dispensaries, and some of the best skiing in the Rocky Mountains with great restaurants.  Something for everyone.

 

The Confusing Ways of British Money

british money photo
It seems like an eternity but I remember well when England used pounds, shillings, and pence. The term £sd stood for librae, solidi, and denarii.  The measurement was based on Roman weights and measures and a pound of silver was divided into 240 denarius.  Remarkably and unfathomably, that stood through my childhood – 240 pence to a pound.

I was thinking the other day of that hilarious bit in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. What did the Romans do for us?  Apart from roads, sanitation, baths, building, currency etc.  So, there we were in the UK and Ireland pretty much using a Roman system for currency when the rest of the world had left us way behind and fled to decimalization.  Hey, that’s not going to happen again.  Yeah right, Brexit!  Screw those Europeans and all that Roman stuff.  We will show them.  Oh crikey!

So how bizarre was it to order a pint of beer for ten pence, egg and chips for just one and five, and a bag of chips for just four pence.  Four of chips please!  Or you could buy something classy for 19 and 11.  Imagine things like twopence and threepence, sixpence was called a tanner, and a shilling was called a bob.  “He is worth a few bob” meant that he was rich.  A pound was, and still is, called a quid or a knicker.  Half of a pound was a ten bob note or a tenner.  Lend me a tenner!  They even made a funny play about a tenor and a tenner and the play on words.  Two shillings and sixpence was half a crown or half a dollar.  Confused!?  Exactly!

But actually, the transition to decimalization surprisingly went remarkably well.  Prices rose, of course, but it was the British version of unification in Germany.  I mean we were nearly as efficient as the Germans!  Not as impressive but not bad.  Of course, the Italians did change currency along with most of the European countries by adopting the Euro on January 1st, 1999.  The Brits stuck with the pound!

So, I bought some coins the other day at a museum and it made me laugh.  I thought of egg and chips for one and six at the local café.  Travel changes lives.

 

 

Asparagus Season

Asparagus Season

The season of asparagus is on us. In Germany it’s practically a religious institution. Spargel is everywhere. They put dollops of hollandaise on top to negate the healthy calories of the green, but what I love most about asparagus season is wandering through the supermarkets of Paris. In France the true delicacy of the asparagus season, is white asparagus. So how is it done? How do you sap the color from asparagus?

It’s simple, you deprive it of light, like in Plato’s cave. That process is called etiolation and it’s supposed to make the stalks weaker. There’s something fabulous about white asparagus, cultivated as it is, under a cover of earth. Its texture and taste are completely different. The season is now – it’s much thicker than a regular stalk of asparagus; more brittle and simply delicious.

So why does it taste so damn good? I have a theory. Imagine you’ve been buried under a mound of earth for the whole winter, and suddenly someone comes and shows you the sun. It brings color to your cheeks and a smile to your face…before of course you are plunged into boiling hot water and served to someone like me. Incidentally be careful of pairing with wine. Asparagus is not great with tannic red or oaked wines – unless of course you slather it with hollandaise.  Luckily for those who can’t imagine a meal unaccompanied by wine, Fiona Beckett at Matching Food and Wine – has put together a helpful list of wine and asparagus pairings.

Lunch at Da Fortunato al Pantheon in Rome

Lunch at Da Fortunato al Pantheon in Rome

I’ve been coming to Rome for a long time, yet every time I want a great lunch I always end up at the same place: Da Fortunato al Pantheon.  It seems as though the waiters have been there as long as I’ve been going there. They remember you, they’re nice. The most important thing is that the food is simply out of this world.  I always have the same thing, depending on the season: either untarelle, a chicory dish with anchovies, or radicchioalla grilla, the spaghetti alla vongole veraci and a large bottle of sparkling water.  It’s quite simply the greatest lunch experience I’ve ever had in the world.

It’s simple; the restaurant is discreetly tucked away behind the Pantheon Square, the Piazza della Rotonda.  I am sort of a chaotic kind of guy and I know Rome really well – I like to experiment, try different restaurants, and discover new things in cities. But there’s never been a time where I’ve been in Rome and not gone to this marvelous institution; because in the end, there is simply nothing better than the food at this restaurant.

 

The Rialto Fish Market Five Course Dinner

The Rialto Fish Market Five Course Dinner

I needed to prepare a five course dinner for New Year’s Eve. As luck would have it, I was in Venice and a friend of mine knew a fish guy.  My friend had arranged to meet with me earlier in a bar for a cappuccino and we walked fast-paced across the maze of streets of La Rialto, where he introduced me to another guy who knew the fish guys that sold the good stuff. I felt a little like Jason Bourne. Abutting the Erberia, the vegetable market, is the Pescheria, one of the highlights of any visit to Venice.  You will see fish you’ve never seen: eels in the winter time, scallops in their shells, swordfish with their beaks on and razor clams called cape onghe.

I had decided that I would wait to prepare the menu until I saw what I had. I was introduced to the Fish Guy; I looked around. I would start with 10 large scallops. I would grill them in their shell with some oil and garlic. Then I was going to follow this with grilled razor clams. I would follow the razor clams with two pastas, one with small shrimp and zucchini and the other using artichoke that were in season that I planned to grab from the Erberia, and then finish off with a zuppa di pesce, which sounds decidedly better than its name in English – Fish Soup.

He asked me how I would do it. I felt the answer had to be good or he might turn me away. I would start with a fennel and onion base (he nodded slowly), add some tomatoes (ok)…then I told him I needed a good fish head or two for the broth (I’ve piqued his curiosity!), and then I would create a broth that I could empty the raw fish into for the last 10 minutes of preparation! He looked at me and said come back in 15 minutes. I returned and he’d neatly prepared bags for every course. In the fish soup there were scallops and langostina, a little monkfish, and all placed in at the very end, topped with tiny toasted pieces of bread with a dollop of aioli on them. We served the soup at 1am in the morning, having celebrated the fireworks in St. Marks at midnight. It wouldn’t have been possible without “my guy. “

 

Airport Lounges

Airline Lounges getting Lazy?

Airline Lounges Getting Lazy?

Clubs and places to hang out at airports are reaching a troubling intersection. Once the harbor of calm and safety, where you might feel like a million bucks, airline clubs are fast becoming overcrowded and unreliable.

Take American Admiral’s Club for example. What Admiral are they referring to? Certainly not Nelson! Please. It’s awful. Or the Delta Sky Club– there’s not much to eat: a few pretzels and some awful nuts that even if you’re not allergic to, you should be! You have to pay for the alcohol and if you were planning on a meal before a long flight…good luck! And what’s worse, Delta won’t even allow you in with stuff you have been forced to grab outside – probably for fear that others will catch on that there’s absolutely no value inside! You’re better off taking your chances in the vastly improving terminal buildings.

New concessions have opened, healthy and actually decent – places you don’t mind hanging out at. The other day at Chicago O’Hare I even noticed that Starbucks, the only bastion in days gone by, of decent coffee and half decent sandwiches, had no line. People had found healthier options and better coffee!

So, McDonald’s and Auntie Anne’s and those awful places that are still hanging around, watch out! Your concession license may cost more than your daily take – at least let’s hope so!

But it’s not all bad. Has anyone been to a Virgin International lounge recently? It’s actually good. There’s food to eat – variety, free drinks ! And if you have an American Express platinum card there’s a great club called Centurion Club. Sadly it’s only in 4 locations: LAS, DFW, SFO, and LGA. But the service is great, food decent and it made my transit and the vastly improved Dallas airport actually pleasant. Did I say Amex did something nice for its customers? Where’s the Visa lounge!?

airline food

Airline Food

Airline Food

All this fuss about Emirates and Etihad and how the food just knocks your socks off, I don’t buy it. I was recently lucky enough to be upgraded to first class on British Airways. The food was unacceptably bad – really if I had been paying the price of that ticket, it would have ranked per bite, as the worst meal dollar per dollop I’ve ever had.

Airline food

Airline food

Those good old days when they’d fire up the stove, simmer the mushrooms and pan fry the sirloin in front of you, have gone. But still, we clamor for those moments on board. No matter that we may have eaten in the lounge before or grabbed a quick sandwich in the departure lounge, we still get excited when they walk down the aisle, no matter what class of service you’re in. Sometimes it’s just a bag of crisps, an infinitesimally small bag of nuts where the packaging must’ve cost ten times the contents, or that delightful piece of overcooked chicken or the omelet in first class that looks as though it were cooked last year. No matter! We wait with expectation as the trolley rumbles down the aisle – and we go for it!

Just like the glass of wine, we know she shouldn’t, but we go for that too. It’s something to do while you’re awake. Let’s be really honest here, the only difference between the categories is the legroom, the rest is all an illusion, best dealt with by a sandwich in the airport or an Ambien just before you take off.