Whatever Happened to Foreign Food........

[Alex H]

or When Did the Italians Take Over the World

Up until about 2000 my wife and I always took foreign holidays. Short of South America and the Soviet Block, we've seen more than our fair share of the world. After we bought a house here, we just came here for holidays. recently I've had one of those birthdays with an '0' at the end and we had a 3 week holiday to Germany, Denmark, Sweden ending up in Berlin for the actual day.

So now to the point of the post;

in the first German hotel it was 'Italian Buffet Week'

In Denmark - a steak house one night and traditional (sort of) the next

2nd hotel in Denmark the restaurant was closed, so chicken in a steak house in the local town (again - see above)
Sweden is famous for it's meatballs - really? Only in Ikea as far as I can tell.

Even in Stockholm, you could have any world cuisine you liked, but Swedish, no sorry.

Finally found the meatballs at Hamlet's castle in Denmark

Copenhagen was a day of Pizza and day of Weinershnitzel

In Berlin German cuisine seemed to be a rarity - the restaurant attached to our hotel was, Yes, Italian.

on the way back we stopped at Nuremburg and here was a real German restaurant

Glad to be back in France really

I'm not saying the restaurants don't exist, it's just they seem very thin on the ground, unlike France and the UK. Wonder what Italy's like?

 

[Sandra Piddock]

I went to Italy a few years back, and just about every other restaurant seemed to be a pizzeria. The ones in between were pasta houses, but I can't say I noticed any other country's cuisines while we were there.

We found a good concentration of German restaurants in the Drosselgasse, in Ruddesheim, but the best German restaurant we've ever been to was in Playa de Palma, on Mallorca. Because there are a lot of German expats there, we had a job to find Spanish food!

 

[crimsonghost747]

I've noticed the same thing when traveling! It's really really hard to find local restaurants, especially in the Nordic countries.

One solution that works well in Finland/Sweden/Norway is to go out for lunch rather than dinner. Most of the real restaurants are a bit more classy and serve mostly European food but there are a lot of lunch cafe's that serve local dishes. They usually only serve food for a couple of hours during lunch time and you might only have one or two different dishes every day.