Travel Foodie Memories
What are your favourite travel food memories? You know the ones I mean. Sometimes you have a gastronomic experience that is so great that you can still almost taste it 10 or 20 years later. Sometimes it’s not about the food but about the context while at other times it is very much about the food. Here are some of my best loved food travel experiences.
Iced Tea, Venezuela
It’s been more than 20 years but I can still remember the first time I tasted iced tea. These days, everyone’s drinking it but it was much more of a rarity in the 80s — and I’ve never found anywhere that can make iced tea in the way I first had it. This was during my trip to Venezuela when I was still a student. Around the corner, say about 10 minutes walk from where we were staying in Sabana Grande, was an Arab eatery that served the falafel with iced tea. This tea did not taste like tea at all — it had a heavenly scent of lemons and exotic spices. It didn’t taste like lemonade either — more like Pimms without the alcohol — but it was pure ambrosia.
Paella and Guitar, Barcelona
Fast forward a few years and I was in Barcelona with a couple of friends. It was our first trip and we decided that we had to sample paella. We couldn’t have picked a better location. It was a cafe with a view of the beach. It was warm and breezy. When we ordered we got a paella large enough to feed six — or so it seemed. It was beautifully presented and we tucked in with gusto. But the experience got even better when a thin man with very few teeth came to our table and started to play the Spanish guitar. While we knew it was probably a cheesy tourist gimmick the guitar added the right setting for our Spanish meal.
Garlic Pizza, the Alps
What’s exciting about garlic pizza, you may ask? This is one case where the context made the dish exciting. A friend and I had been visiting Nice when she had a problem with the car. It was a Saab and had to go to a registered dealer. The problem proved to be easy to fix but quite costly so we emptied our pockets to pay for the repairs so we could resume our trip to Germany. We left just enough for emergencies. We set off, driving through the night across the Alps, sharing a bottle of water and waiting until the last possible minute before getting something to eat as we knew that would be the last meal we would have for about eight hours. At last we happened upon a little mountain cafe. We went in and looked at the menu — all we could afford was the garlic pizza, but we were so hungry that nothing had ever tasted that good.
These are just a few of my food travel experiences, have you got any to share?
(Photo: vanaclocha)
Tags: alps, Destinations, food, spain, travel, travel food, venezuela
