Plucky Survivors See Europe: Eating My Way Through Europe

I’m leaving in three days, and we haven’t talked about food?  What the hell?

Food, for me, is both a joy and sorrow.  I love eating and would categorize myself as a foodie, but for my entire life food has often been my enemy.  I mean, it tried to kill me.  I was very overweight as a kid, developed severe acid reflux as an adult, and eventually got esophageal cancer because of it.  After they basically cut me in half and chopped out a big chunk of my digestive system, eating represents a challenge.  I won’t go into the gory details, but any meal at any time – even ones I’ve eat a million times – can cause very unpleasant side effects from severe pain to… well, let’s just say that I do a lot of reading.

Bonus points if you get that joke.

Still, I cherish a great meal and so whenever I travel, I do a metric crap-ton of research on places to eat.

I start with professional food critic sources.  I was a travel writer for a long time and I believe that people who write about food for a living (or even a side hustle) take the time to really understand a restaurant’s nuances – from the menu to the atmosphere to the service and beyond – that your average Joe doesn’t.  The specifics may not always align with my taste – I don’t like seafood so I don’t care how much a critic likes it – but in general I find that the places they recommend that do have menus that appeal to me are often ones I enjoy.

Unfortunately, professional food review is fewer and farther between these days, mostly replaced in the public consciousness by crowd-sourced review platforms like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google.  It’s not my first stop when I’m doing advance research because I’m come to learn that the things I like don’t always match with the things that the masses enjoy.

So, I’ll start by devouring (pun intended) foodie sites, blogs, and any publication that has food reviews to find places that sound interesting to me.  I’ll read the critic’s opinion and then go to the menu to see if it has something that makes me go “mmmm, I want to go to there.”

Only then will I turn to crowd-sourced opinions to find more possibilities, but I usually cross reference those against professional reviews if they exist.

Here’s the problem, though – it’s time-consuming and while it may work for a single destination that I’m visiting for a week, the idea of doing that for 30 different cities over 10 weeks across Europe AND the places in between them that I’ll be passing through as I drive is impossible. 

And even if it was, I’m not 100% sure what part of any given city I’ll be in at mealtimes and so developing a list of restaurants to visit that wind up being nowhere near where I am when I get hungry is a waste of time.  I have a list of about 50 restaurants in Manhattan that I want to try at some point but a lot of them are located far afield of where I am seeing shows and so I never go to them.

So, the reason I haven’t talked about what I’m planning to eat in Europe is because I don’t really have a plan. 

I’m going to probably do some minor research while I’m in each city, but in general my intention is to wing it.  When I get hungry, I’m going to see what’s nearby that has a menu that looks good, then do a little Googling to make sure that it is not universally despised or has a long list of health code violations, then eat there.  This means that I will certainly miss out on some incredible meals or experiences but maybe I’ll also stumble into some that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

As for what happens after I eat, well, I’m just going to roll with it as best I can.  My doctor tried to give a prescription for a very specific antibiotic that is used as a prophylaxis for travelers with already established digestive issues, but there is some sort of manufacturing issue and it is not available anywhere.  So, instead he gave me a prescription for a more common antibiotic that I can have on hand just in case.

And of course, they have doctors and pharmacies and places I can read in Europe also, so I’ll figure it out.

Okay, now I’m hungry.  Are we there yet?