Meat or fish?
Have you ever flipped through a restaurant menu as thick as the phone book and been overwhelmed by choices? (Remember phone books? If so, you probably also remember that lovely screeching noise that dial-up connections used to make back in the day. But I digress…)
But let me set the scene: It’s 2003. After wrestling with Ryanair and airports nowhere near the advertised city, we finally reached a tiny coastal town in Italy hours late in the evening. We were exhausted and starving.
Luckily, there was a restaurant right next door to our hotel. We walked into an almost empty building ready to put our, let’s say, rudimentary Italian to the test.
But instead of being confronted with a menu, the waitress slunk over to our table and asked us one question: “Carne o pesce? (Meat or fish)
In that moment, I was grateful for simplicity and my childhood by the sea.
Fish it was. And when I say the meal was exquisite? I mean it.
Mystery courses arrived one after the next. Delicious and drizzled in the most decadent olive oil. We had no idea what we were eating, but who really cared? We rolled out of there, happy and very, very full.
[Photo by The-Lore on Unsplash]