The New Gastronomes

To Mrs. Eleni Papadogiannaki

How can you define what “tourist food” is? And how did this term emerge? Definitely when it comes to mind, memories of really low-quality food immediately come back. So, why are tourist places so famous for their bad-quality food? Is it because tourists are considered a special category of people that doesn’t know anything about food, do we seek to punish them for being noisy and crowding popular places by inventing “special” places of retribution that offer our worst food? Of course there is a small exception: those people who choose gastronomic tourism. They are well-informed about food, having done research, and are therefore demanding. The truth is that the poor tourists are basically people who want to relax from the frenetic pace of big cities. They therefore spend a few days going around, tasting food in several places. So if they are lucky, they find something at least decent to eat. To find something good to eat is often an adventurous experience; you have to climb steep mountains or drive on back roads, finally to find a tiny place in the middle of nowhere. And instead of a greasy fat cook, a grandmother or a housewife will be there, ready to amaze you with her cooking skills.

I still haven’t figured out how people view us, as students of UNISG, visiting places to eat during our study trips. Are we seen as tourists or just a bunch of students training to be “experts?” Usually the latter. My query emerged when we visited a famous restaurant in Crete, particularly acknowledged for its devotion to localness, seasonality, and, above all, tradition, in regard to the preparation of food. Needless to say, what we experienced there was the complete opposite. I am still trying to figure out who was fooling who: the “chef” who had no hesitation in serving us out-of-season, frozen vegetables, and offering us pork cooked in a simple manner, naming it with some variation of the famous cured meat of the island; or us, who clapped our hands at the end of the dinner, suspended between our own impressions and what others had tried to convince us of about what we had just eaten. It is again true that when you are not a native eater it is hard to judge whether or not what you ate is good and/or original. And it is certain that owners of tourist restaurants count on this. However, in our case, the contradiction was more than obvious. You did not need to be an expert to see it.

The previous day’s disturbance of our tasty peace was quickly forgotton after our next dinner. In this small, little-known restaurant, the cook was not a famous chef, but a local housewife. Regardless, she taught us the real taste of local, traditional, and seasonal food, without frill or declaration, without fancy ambience, cheap music or endless, colorful catalogs, without annoyingly persistent waiters who drag you into the restaurant. The irony is that all of the big cooks and chefs of those restaurants visit this small taverna at least once a month, because for them this food is their benchmark, their inspiration, and their yardstick to realize how far they are—or not—from what they consider as tradition. Hopefully there are these little places—islands of quality food in the sea of tourist-corruptive restaurants. But who can protect tourists from having such bad experiences? Maybe we should take into serious consideration the establishment of a body of guards to go around to tourist places, assigned to inspect for true taste and to discipline offenders.