The Exchange Experience: The Italian Eating Experience

I've been requested to do an Eating Experience report because well -
1. I love eating
2. I was in charge of finding the restaurants/eateries that we visited
3. I took photos of the dishes that we ate

Well from the beginning, Italian food was what most of us had imagined - just pizzas, pasta, lasagna and spaghetti. It seemed to us that almost every restaurant (trattoria), pizzeria or gelateria served the same thing, but finding this website (www.letsgo.com) helped us make some good eating choices!

Reaching Venice, the lack of the familiar fast food restaurants or cafes that we kept seeing in Singapore or in the UK left us with few choices! In fact, there is only one Macs in the entire Venice and this was a fact that they proudly advertised and they also used to charge high prices - a Big Mac meal cost as much as EUR 7.50! But compared to many of the restaurants that charged EUR 10 and above, it became a cheaper but worse option.

Nonetheless, we were able to make some food bargains. From Zach's blog post you can see our bargain meals for Day 1, where we spent about EUR 10 only per person for both lunch and dinner. We then tried a Macs burger + 1.5L drink from supermarket combo for lunch the next day - it's interesting to note that most restaurants are pretty fine with us bringing outside food in (provided that we had some food from the restaurant as well). In fact, in large outlets like Macs with not so many workers, people can even just sit there to enjoy air-con or wait for a train. For our last proper meal, we even managed to find a pretty worthwhile 3 course dinner for only EUR 10.50 each:

Going to Florence, we found a brochure at our hostel advertising for a buffet nearby for only EUR 8 that is inclusive of even one cocktail! We didn't want to miss out any good deals so there we went! The food wasn't too bad, but we realised that the meat cooked Italian style tend to be rather raw. (that sign basically says drink with buffet for only EUR 8)

For our second night in Florence, we decided to try something Italian - so I had beef goulash while Zach had risotto with mushrooms:

Onto Rome - the capital of Italy and also well Italian food. For one, we tried a local specialty that one might not associate with Italian food - it's fried stuffed zucchini flowers.

Of course, given the huge amounts of trattorias and pizzerias everywhere, we took care to make sure that the food we got for our money, was worthwhile! We developed several rules of thumb:

1. Pizzas are good if the restaurant has a brick oven - otherwise, it's likely to be some microwaved pizza that you can actually get for less than EUR 3 from a supermarket.
2. A restaurant is good if you have locals eating there, such as office workers eating during lunch. Another sign is if you can hear a lot of Italian but not English at these restaurants - if there isn't a dedicated English menu or "tourist menu" and if the restaurant staff can barely speak English - your food will be all the more authentic!
3. Bars are good if local guys have their bachelor's night there :D
4. Lastly, a Big NO if it's super close to any popular tourist destination - e.g. St Peter's Basilica, Colosseum, Spanish steps, Trevi Fountain or Termini station

Anyway here are all the various Italian food that we ate...

Look at the pizza in the far right (which is the only one we ate in Rome!) - that's the way to make pizza with bacon :D

Lastly, what is Italian food without some gelato? Staying near the Vatican, we managed to eat the best gelato in Rome twice! We also managed to try the best one in Florence also! (They are also comparatively cheap! Only EUR 1.50 for a huge and tasty scoop!)

Here's us at Florence:

Here's us at Rome - note the long queue! This gelateria is really popular not just because it's cheap, it's also because the people serving the ice cream do not seem to care about the size of the portion - they just dig their scoops and dump everything on your cone/cup!