Little siblings

When I travel, I try to have a fantastic lunch and generally try to get a low-key dinner. Not only does this often save money, but it lets you eat your biggest meal at a time of day when you're likely to burn some of it off. Furthermore, it often happens that you're sightseeing in the pricey end of town, but staying in a neighborhood or a place that's more sparsely populated with decent meals.

But sometimes the high-end restaurant is too rich at any time, or doesn't serve lunch at an affordable price or even at all. There's a workaround for that: the little sibling from the same celebrity chef. In Chicago, these restaurant interrelationships are so numerous that they're almost incestuous. Instead of visiting Girl and the Goat for dinner, we dined at Little Goat just across the street (which is possible nearly any time of day). We eschewed BellyQ for Urban Belly, which shares the chef, the building, and a few of its big sib's menu items. And we got a three-fer of chefs Scott Harris of Mia Francesca, Tony Mantuano of Spiaggia, Jimmy Bannos and Jimmy Bannos Jr. of Heaven on Seven by choosing the small-plates restaurant The Purple Pig.

Marinated Chinese Eggplant with Thai Basil & Crispy Shallot at Urban Belly

The technique for uncovering these places is easy. First, find the well-regarded chefs in a place you're visiting. This is probably the easiest part. If you're already stumped, visit food sites such as Food Network and Bravo's Top Chef and use the city's name as a starting point.

Maybe there's a profile article somewhere that lists all of that chef's restaurants to study further. If not, couple the chef's name (or just the term "chef" with the name of the city) with "affordable" or "approachable" and search away. Even if you don't find the most famous candidates for affordable meals that represent the local cuisine, you'll definitely find something worth exploring.

On recipes and receipts

As a traveler, you're limited in what you can know about a restaurant to visit. Guidebooks tell you not to patronize places that post photos of the food (a notion I find ridiculous on a tourist trail). But it is true that you might not know enough about the language to scope out ingredients or preparation. (I had my eyes open before I tried tripe soup in Turkey, but disliked it anyway. Sorry, Turkey.)

Furthermore, restaurants in tourist areas, after all, don't have to worry too much about repeat business that they'd get from providing great experiences to diners.

Knowing something about local laws can provide a window into what you're getting. In Italy, it sometimes happens that a policeman will stop someone leaving a restaurant to inspect the receipt (the proof of restaurant revenues for later taxation.) But the receipt doesn't have to show up until the meal is finished.

In Greece, a reputable place won't bring even a bottle of water to the table without providing a receipt (often rolled up in a little Lucite holder.) Again, this is to ensure, upon inspection by a visiting authority, that the restaurant is obeying laws.

Greeks have a long history of caring about freshness from the sea

Greek restaurants are also required to state on the menu whether the ingredients in a dish are fresh or frozen. In my anecdotal experience, this doesn't happen as often as it might.

Why do you care, as a traveler? Because in lots of places you can't do your own inspection of the place. To me, whether the eatery follows the rules in the dining room provides an insight into how it works the rules inside the kitchen. That matters to me.

I wish I'd thought about this idea that time in Acapulco when I petted the restaurant's monkey and then ate my lunch.

Could we have a word?

One of the problems you encounter with foreign menus is that the locals are on a first-name basis with dishes that you’ve never met. Or, in the south of France, they can tutoyer the meals, referring to them by the familiar tu form when you haven’t yet been introduced to them. Let’s say you’re in France, and you see some menu choices.

Well, you could get aïoli. Excellent selection, madame. It’s often the plat du jour on Friday. So you look it up in your guidebook’s food section. And I can nearly guarantee that you’ll be told, correctly, that aïoli is a mayonnaise strongly flavored with garlic. As it turns out, I’m not a mayo fan normally, but I can lick aïoli right off of a spoon. But that doesn’t mean I could have it as my whole lunch.

And luckily for me, neither could anyone else. The main dish called aïoli (short for grand aïoli) actually comprises a portion of seafood or vegetables (Friday remains a fish day in France, a repealed religious principle that people continue to observe while breaking most of the still-standing ones.)

The point is that this isn’t just a big mess o’ mayo, it’s a plate in which the mayo plays a starring role. They just never mention the food that goes with the mayo, arguably an important oversight. Come to think of it, this reminds me of fondue, which simply means “melted”. But nobody’s dipping pricey shellfish into melted cheese.

Similarly, in Provence, they will serve purée alongside your meat or fish (and sometimes underneath it.) Purée, unadorned with further description, is what we’d call mashed potatoes. And potatoes can be ignored in another popular Provencal dish called “farcis”. The word “farcis” means “stuffed.” And without further elaboration, it means that veggies – peppers, eggplants, zucchinis, potatoes, or tomatoes, for example – are stuffed with a mixture and baked until they are caramelized. But the dish is called “stuffed”, not telling you anything specific about either the stuffing or the stuffee. And once in awhile, you’ll see elaboration for it on the chalkboard: ”Petits farcis” or “little stuffed”. Hmmm, does that mean that the vegetables are small or that they’re only a little stuffed?

So it’s a dish, in a word. And if I remember my poetry studies at all, the word is either “metonymy” or “synecdoche”, though I never remember which one is which. In my opinion, though, a more accurate word is “yum.”

Marching Orders: Deconstructing the menu of the day

Much more often than in the US, restaurants in Western Europe will offer a multi-course menu that changes every day. Most places limit this meal to weekdays, but you sometimes see one on Sunday and less often, on Saturday. Sometimes there are two courses (a starter and a main or a main and a dessert), and rarely, it’s all three. The menu might include some wine or a coffee. Strangely, when wine is offered, most often you can’t substitute a soft drink or even sparkling water. The menu of the day just is what it is.

The menu of the day will always cost less than the sum of its parts, if you had ordered the sum of its parts or even if the sum of the parts were available in the printed version. It’s usually advertised on a chalkboard or some other temporary place. The daily menu might be a loss leader to tempt patrons to stop in. So it’s a value meal. But it’s revealing that the elements of the meal are unique to a particular day. It's not a menu item for less money. It’s a blind date for the restaurant, not a mate.

Sometimes the restaurant has more menus than one to choose from, and the difference in quality as you step up should be apparent.

The daily menu at a fine restaurant will be always better and pricier than the one at the cheap place, but the meal that’s included will almost certainly include dishes that would be at the low end of what’s generally on offer wherever you are. So it’s not surprising that today’s cut of beef is a tough one, or the main is a pasta dish that’s easy to make in quantity, or the starter is soup rather than some carefully composed appetizer.

Here’s a menu at about the price of a normal main, with a dessert bonus. This dish, hachis parmentier, is basically shepherd’s pie wearing a cheese hat, but in France, even peasant food is yummy, and the portion is generous.

The benefits of selecting the menu of the day are numerous:

• You will be full when you finish it.
• You’re eating a better meal than you’re paying for. At the normal price, lunch could cost nearly twice as much.
• You might be benefiting from the savings on an ingredient that happened to be available in quantity at a low price.
• You get to eat the way the locals eat. Restaurants sometimes call it a tourist menu, but it isn’t really for us.
• An inexpensive big lunch can mean that you can spend less money on a smaller dinner (and eat a little healthier in timing, if not calorically).
• Dessert doesn’t have any calories if you don’t order it outright.

So here are my rules of the road for choosing a place with a menu of the day:

• If the main ingredient in any course is expensive, the portion will be small.
• Spend at the middle or upper end of what you’d pay for a single course at the same restaurant, or you might be disappointed with what you get.
• Don’t hope that a steak will be a good cut of meat. It just won’t. Still, most cuisines have figured out how to disguise less-than-perfect fare with sauces.
• Experiment with the local cuisine. Restaurants might put crazy options on the menu for the local adventurer, but they won’t take big chances with the meal that everyone will eat today. This is a chance to eat like the locals without taking a large risk.

Lunch should be a special part of any travel day, and the menu of the day can help.

A national cuisine is a quilt, not a blanket

Countries don't spring up all assembled into a unified culture, and cuisines and habits vary according to ancient tribal borders. Some cuisines find their way across the nation, like hamburgers, I suppose, but others are ubiquitous in some places and endangered in others.

We found this out the hard way when we discovered the tomato-topped tostada (that I wrote about earlier) in Cartagena, Spain. We thought that our second-breakfast was set for the remainder of our visit. Soon after that, we left Cartagena and worked our way north. We should have seen it coming. First, the breakfast specials stopped including the tostada. They'd make one for us, if we asked. As we moved along the coast, the tomato puree would be wrong. Then the tostada disappeared.

But you always gain something (we've been gaining a bit too much all summer) when you leave one set of food customs in one region and find another in the next. For example, as we crept north, the montadito appeared. This appears to be the result of interbreeding between tapas and sandwiches. A bit of fish or cheese or meat is placed on a slice of baguette. You eat as many as you like. Often, they're impaled with sticks (for accounting purposes, apparently) and priced at something under two euros. You might take them to your table on your own, and the waiter simply has to count sticks and empty bottles to figure out what you owe (a bit too close to the honor system to work in the US.)

Montaditos appeared when we arrived in Alicante, but only in the form of "100 Montaditos", a restaurant chain that will be opening thousands of worldwide locations even in the US (called by Business Week "the Spanish Starbucks of Sandwiches".) By the time we were in Barcelona, montaditos were everywhere, and nary a franchise in sight. They're lovely to look at even only as a still life, and delightful to eat. Just don't expect to see them in Galicia.

The lesson we drew from this is that cuisines aren't national; they're very local. The folks on one side of a mountain range will eat very differently from the people over yonder. And if you really like to eat a certain local dish, get as much of it as you can in the place that it's on every menu. Because you never know if you'll see it again.

Putting the Pi in paella

One of the virtues of eating in restaurants, whether home or away, is that you can have something that you'd never make for yourself. When the local dish is complicated, or it has to be made in large quantities, or needs a pan you don't have, or it contains a lot of something that you don't normally have around the house, you should be sure to look for it when you're traveling.

In Spain, paella is that dish. Like tagine in Morocco or casserole at home, paella is named for the cooking vessel it uses. The paella pan can be as small as a stove burner and as large as 20 meters (more than 65 feet) in diameter. We know this because a paella of that size is listed in the Guinness Book of Records and fed more than 100,000 people. That's a big dish. It's often cooked outdoors, and guests have been known to eat it right out of the pan.

Though it's widely believed that paella is Spain's national dish, Spaniards associate it regionally with its birthplace in Valencia. The Valencian and therefore official version of paella contains some ingredients you might not want to ponder while you're eating this delightful dish: chicken, rabbit, and land snails, flat beans, large white beans, and other beans, and saffron, which gives it a delicate flavor and that rusty, caramelized color. Yes, there are snails in this dish, and this might explain the gigantic bags of snails that are piled on every seafood counter in Spanish markets. On the plus side, early versions of the dish contained water vole (a rodent) and eel, and lucky for us, that's not how paella is made anymore.

An alternate version of the dish uses seafood instead of meat, and is often available alongside Valencian paella in restaurants, as is shown above. Valencian paella is on the left side of this photo, and seafood paella is on the right. There's a "mixed" version that can include sausage, a variety of vegetables, and even different seasonings. You'll find that version elsewhere in Spain and around the world, but it horrifies Valencians. Somehow sausage and seafood doesn't work for them, but eel and marsh rats are a match made in heaven. In any case, I'm nearly positive I'll never cook paella. But it's a joy to let someone else do it.

Marching Orders: Adjust your body clock

Let's assume that you've arrived in a very new place, and there's a time change. Everyone knows that you need to adjust your sleeping habits. But it's important to reset your meal clock as well, and not just to the new time zone. You have to adjust to the rhythms of the culture. If you don't, well, you'll be swimming upstream for your entire visit.

Spain's a great example, a place where eating matters, and restaurants abound. But Spaniards eat snacks when we eat meals, and they tend to eat meals when we're off doing something else entirely, like going to bed. On our very first arrival in Spain, we tried to conform to our own food schedule as best we could. But restaurants don't open for dinner until eight or nine in the evening, and few local people are ready for the evening meal until well after that. We'd have our noses pressed against the restaurant door waiting for them to open up at eight, and then we'd eat dinner in an empty place. Depressing.

How do they wait for such a late dinner? By eating lunch at about three or four in the afternoon. How can they wait that long for lunch? They eat breakfast when we do. But they have a snack at about noon.

We often have what we call "second breakfast" when we're traveling. It's normally a cup of coffee and a pastry mid-morning. It's handy if you're running around ancient sites or you've just absorbed a museum, or if you just want an excuse to sit at a table portside. And face it, pastry is delicious. But our conventional second breakfast is too early (and probably too empty) to sustain us until lunch in mid-afternoon. So while we're in Spain, we have adjusted to a noon snack, and we're doing what we see around us.

Here's a tostada, with café con leche and fresh orange juice (normally, you'd get one or the other of these beverages.) This happens to be pan intégrale (whole-grain bread), but there's a white toast version of this as well. You can ask for a variety of toppings, but if you don't specify, you'll often get pureed tomatoes and a large drizzle of olive oil.

You might as well adapt. If you don't, you'll limit the number and type of places that will be open when you're hungry, you'll limit your ordering options, and worst of all, you'll be missing life abroad.

Crunch Senhor

Well, I really couldn't find a way to translate the term croque monsieur from French to Portuguese. But I'd like to make the case that the sandwich itself, while delicious, has lost something in the translation as well.

The sandwich known in Portugal as Francesinha (or "little frenchie" or "little French girl") originated in Porto, in Portugal's north. It's said that a French/Belgian immigrant wanted to adapt the French croque monsieur to the Portuguese palate. This is the result, a sandwich of ham, pork and beef slices on thick bread, swathed in cheese and a spicy tomato and beer sauce and served hot.

Most Francesinha sandwiches arrive with French fries, somewhat drowned in the sauce. Often, there's a fried egg on top of the whole creation. The only ingredient common to all versions of this dish is beer.

 

We had our first Francesinha in Porto, its home town. Though the sandwich itself and especially the sauce can vary from town to town and from interpretation to interpretation, this sandwich does not at all make me think of France. No, I think of the diners and delis of my youth, the open-face roast beef or turkey sandwiches, covering a plate in the shape and size of a serving dish, brimming with sauce, and combining into a molten embrace of home cooking. Fries alongside were immersed in the gravy just like in the Francesinha, or the whole thing was plopped onto a mound of mashed potatoes.

This is the memory that is evoked by the Francesinha. The beer matures it up, and the spice provides some adult zing. But this takes me back like no croque monsieur ever did.

Sardines for Saint Anthony

The Saint Anthony festival is the midsummer celebration in Portugal. Like most other midsummer celebrations (such as Midsommer in Scandinavia and St. John's Eve in Greece), midsummer happens before or on the actual arrival of summer. For some reason that eludes me, midsummer celebrations often involve jumping over a roaring bonfire.

In Portugal, and especially in the Alfama section of Lisbon, this is one of the biggest parties of the year. The midsummer holiday happens in mid-June and honors St. Anthony, who's associated with matchmaking. So this holiday is something like Valentine's Day. Shy suitors can take the opportunity to win over hearts with romance in large doses. But this holiday isn't about chocolate; you give your lover a potted herb called manjerico. This plant is a sort of basil, with tiny delicate leaves, and groomed into a round bush. It's decorated with a small paper with a verse on it; what's romance without poetry?

But you can't make a meal of basil and love, so grilled sardines are also on the menu. They're a common starter or main dish in most restaurants at all times, but St. Anthony's Festival provides them a grand stage. They're associated with this saint, who was not only a great romantic, but was apparently able to converse with fish. Why this means that we should grill them is beyond me, but they are delicious.

It took some persuasion for us to get the sardine-seller to provide any plastic utensils. We watched people eat them and understood why. Each sardine is about the length of an unsharpened pencil, so they’re too big to eat whole. In fact, people don’t eat the bones of these. Instead, they plop the fish onto a slice of bread, where it hangs over the sides. Then they pick at it with their fingers, pulling the meat away from the skeleton and eating it, leaving a skeleton that looks like something you'd see in a Popeye cartoon. And then you eat the fishy bread.

Don't ever put your nose to the manjerico. The right way to do it is to touch the leaves with your hand, and then smell your hand. But do this before you go after the sardines.

Blowing your cover with a charge in Portugal

There's an undercover cost to meals and snacks in Portugal. It's called the couvert, or "cover". This sort of thing works differently in different countries. In some places, there's a cover charge that generally just pays for table service. In those places, it's not optional. In Portugal, it is optional, but you have to pay attention.

Portuguese menus have a section called "couvert". In that section are items such as bread, cheese, olives, and the like. You don't need to order some of them; they're placed on your table, the way you'd just get a bread basket in America or other places. If you eat it, or any of it, you're charged the cover price. Here's a sampling of the unrequested cover hospitality, local cheese, olives, and bread:

But the prices vary. The bread and the olives cost less than a euro. That little plate of cheese, though, is typically four euros (about six dollars right now). And it isn't pro-rated. You eat one slice; you're buying the plate of it. In Portugal, restaurants are affordable and portions are generous. But getting the bill is a happier occasion if you know the rules.

The cheese stands alone

Galicia comprises the northwestern corner of Spain. It's visited for its plentiful seafood and its pristine beaches. It's also the home of Santiago de Compostela, the third most important pilgrimage site in Christianity, behind Rome and Jerusalem. The Cathedral's stone carvings pay homage to many a Bible character, including one woman, most likely Queen Esther. She has a front-row spot on the Portico de la Gloria, a sculpted facade considered one of the most striking in the world. And she's the one who inspired Galicia's most titillating cheese.

According to local lore, the cathedral's original carving of Queen Esther was well endowed, in her place among the apostles and prophets. Nearby, a carved Daniel was smiling in her direction a bit too broadly, and rumors began to emerge of romance between these two stoners. Local elders were not pleased, and they ordered what amounted to breast reduction surgery, with a chisel.

Now, the citizenry did not receive this news well, and retaliated. A new cheese shape came into fashion, the tetilla, which translates to "small breast." So one of the regional dishes is basically "titty cheese." As a political statement, people would leave this breast-shaped cheese as an offering at the statue. The cheese is still sold everywhere. Nobody leaves it lying around, though. It's too delicious to part with. Got milk?

The breakfast of couch potatoes

In Noia, Galicia, Spain, there's a stand that makes nothing but churros. There's always a large bowl of the most-recent batch of sizzling dough.

Churros y chocolate might actually be less healthy than a big bowl of Count Chocula. This breakfast favorite is constructed from a paste of flour and sugar that is deep-fried in oil. So far, it's just junk food, right?

Then it's served with what you'd think is hot chocolate, since it's hot, and it's chocolate, and it's served in a cup. And though it's treated as a dunking beverage for the churros, it's less a drink and more a sauce. It's thick, and dark, and it wouldn't be out of place drizzled on a hot fudge sundae.

If the fried dough and the sugar dunk aren't diet-busting enough, the portions will do you in. The donut portion of the dish is equivalent to about three unraveled fried crullers. The chocolate portion would cover a prize-winning banana split. All to get your day going.

It all tastes yummy, though, and you get a perverse pleasure out of not cleaning your plate. You simply can't.

Nibbling at the Death Coast

The northwestern corner of Spain is known as the Costa de Morte, or Death Coast, in the region of Galicia. This rocky shore of the Atlantic has swallowed up many fishing vessels over the centuries. It's appropriate we do some swallowing in return.

Galicia's many treasures include octopus, which is tenderized and cooked, then seasoned with olive oil, salt and paprika. It's called pulpo a fiera, but it really isn't spicy. The other dish here is razor clams, called navajas.

Many eateries offer a course called rationes, which roughly means portions. The conventional tapas constitute smaller portions of these dishes.

We expected that these dishes would simply have been an afternoon snack, but this twilight interlude made it largely possible to circumvent dinner altogether that night.

There are about a dozen dishes that show up on the rationes menus in most places, and our plan is to run out of species of fish before we run out of Death Coast.

The wedding is over. Let’s eat.

Our return to the UK wasn’t predicated upon the royal calendar, just on the arrival of the merry month of May. After a restless overnight flight, your body simply doesn’t know what meal makes sense. For me, that’s a great time for sausages, which work any time of day.

What struck me about this pub dish was the presentation. First, the notion of making the dish attractive – for the poster child of pub grub – was a surprise. And the presentation was appealing, even to my half-closed eyes. Second, I just don’t imagine cabbage to be a garnish on a lovely dish, but there it is.

Fit for a future king. Now get some sleep.

The spice of life; hold the spice

A survey done by hotels.com revealed that U.S. travelers are not that adventurous when it comes to eating local cuisine while they're traveling.

The survey found that almost two-thirds of travelers make it a point to try the local cuisine when traveling. Only six percent surveyed said they would not stray off the beaten path, and would only eat cuisine that they were familiar with. Of those polled, 13 percent were not even willing to try any local cuisine at all. Twenty-nine percent had chosen a destination because of its cuisine, and 18 percent prefer to eat at an American fast food chain instead of a local restaurant.

So almost two-thirds of travelers try local cuisine, but then you have to deduct those who chose the destination specifically for its cuisine. That's why they're there. That leaves about only about a third of travelers who think it's a good idea to eat locally.

American fast food? Cuisine that you're familiar with, like marinara sauce? Food is one of the few real pleasures that you get in travel that doesn't need to be translated for you. If you're avoiding surprises, then you're kind of missing the point of leaving your neighborhood.

Trying to eat familiar dishes while you're away is a triple problem. The first is that you're missing out on the cultural experience of travel. The second is that a burger made in another country isn't anything like the burger you're getting at home. The bread is different. The meat is different. The other ingredients (like bread crumbs or who knows what else) are different. Even the fast food places have different menus than they do in America (McCroque, anyone?) And the third problem is that what you think is Chinese food isn't what they serve in Greece or Croatia as Chinese food. And, by the way, neither of them is anything like the food that people actually eat in China. If you want to try Chinese food overseas, go to Beijing.

I admit that I'm more adventurous in, say, France, like the above shellfish starter that included something called bigomeaux (translated to "winkle" or "periwinkle") than I'd be in, say, Syria (where I once had a terrible burger and a fabulous milkshake). But eating real Turkish ice cream (the one I tried was flavored with some kind of tree sap), which has an odd malted flavor, helps you understand your childhood Turkish Taffy candy. After all, one of the joys of travel is that you come back with a better understanding of yourself.

So put down that pizza and try the dish that everyone is eating around you. Even if it's tripe.

A Mess 'a Mezzes

I had occasion to be in Lebanon about a month ago, and hoped to gorge myself on eastern Med cuisine, which is delivered in fine form in Beirut. Alas, I was sick for the entire duration of my visit, and my meals were infrequent and small.

At least, I was able to enjoy one of the best elements of Lebanese cuisine, the mezze plate. This is an assortment of small bites, and the hot version boasts an array of veggies, cheeses or minced meats.



The triangular turnover is fatayer, a spinach pie, and the curved bundle is sambousek. The little cigars have the odd name of rkak, and the croquette at center is kibbeh, which is traditionally in this torpedo shape and fried to a delectable brownness.

There are restaurants in town that specialize in mezzes, and there's no doubt that even a healthy appetite can make a great meal out of these treats.

Always a good time for a scone

Britain has just become the fattest country in Europe. I don't have any scientific data to support this connection, but it's an understandable consequence of the fabulous scone.

Here is the "fruit" version, meaning that there are raisins inside, as opposed to the plain version at left. The right time for a scone is apparently any time that you are not eating a meal: after breakfast or instead of breakfast, in the afternoon, or at "tea", which can be timed to occur any time that you're not sleeping.

These delicious breads would probably be fine on their own, but nobody eats them this way. Instead, they're slathered with clotted cream (which tastes much better than it sounds) and jam. The more health-conscious of its fans eschew the cream and opt for butter instead.

Accompanied by any permutation of fat and sugar, the scone is best accompanied by a nice pot of tea.

For us or a Guinness

It just doesn't seem right to leave Ireland without a nod to the national brew, Guinness. This ruby-colored beverage has been around since the mid-18th century, and is the best-selling alcoholic drink in Ireland, where alcoholic drinks aren't an unusual sight.

For the record, in this region, Guinness (or any beer) is always served in a glass etched with the name of the brew. This probably means that bars must devote half of their indoor space to storing glasses from each one of their suppliers.

Guinness is known for the foamy, indestructible head that inspires drinkers to liken it to a milk shake. This sounds very romantic until you discover that it's the presence of nitrogen (yum) that gives the head its tiny bubbles. Furthermore, part of the process involves the introduction of isinglass taken from fish bladders (double yum), which might or might not be present in the final beverage. This prompts objections from vegetarians, who no doubt would otherwise rally 'round this "meal in a glass."

In its favor, Guinness contains antioxidents and provides the same heart benefits as a low-dose aspirin. But that's not the reason to drink it. It's just a party in a glass.

Thanks, Manx

The Isle of Man is a hub of kipper production, producing thousands in the village of Peel. The Manx word for the dish is skeddan jiarg, which translates to "red herring" (of course, that's irrelevant, isn't it?) Kippers are generally eaten in the morning, or at tea, though you could make a meal out of them, and I did, as shown below.

They're served with bread, and when they make up a whole meal, potatoes are often served alongside, to make a dish called "spuds and herrin."

The kippering process isn't complicated; they're soaked in a brine for a while, and then they're hung on racks over a smoking pile of wood chips. They're grilled before you eat them. And the oil oozing out of them is part of the fun.

Slow food fast in Belfast

Here's a great idea for cities that want to promote their restaurants. Belfast held its second Taste and Music Fest, a smorgasbord of food and sounds. Here's how it worked. The festival went on for five days in a city park, just a large field, really, with a soundstage set up at one end and plastic tables and chairs covering the grass. Along one side were more than a dozen booths from local restaurants.

You pay to get in, and then you buy bags of tokens, which you can exchange for food. Each dish cost a handful of tokens, in the £3-4 range, or hovering just under $5. The restaurants and caterers at the booths provided a small menu, maybe one starter, one main, and one sweet (notice that we are separated by a common language again). This gave the restaurants the opportunity to innovate with dishes like:

• Salt 'n' chilli squid with spicy mayo and napa sauce from the Mourne Seafood Bar
• Kettyle Irish beef and Guinness from Deli on the Green
• Roast belly of pork, smoked apple, watercress and shallot salad from James Street South
• Kangaroo burger with a grain mustard mayo and dressed salad leaves from Australian restaurant Uluru
• Pavlova with summer berries, raspberry coulis and vanilla cream from Mango Catering and Events

The bands that played all afternoon were similarly diverse: jazz, rock, and swing, and a tent alongside was converted into a kitchen, complete with overhead mirrors, for chefs from Belfast's finest eateries to demonstrate what they do best. I watched a demonstration by Dean Coppard of Uluru, which culminated in tastes of both dishes -- kangaroo (which tastes like venison to me), and crocodile (tasted like chicken, of course, albeit a surly one.)

Chef Coppard gave advice to us that works well for travel. He said, "Don't be put off by fine restaurants. Sometimes they aren't that much more money than the place you normally go. Look for specials and fixed menus, and you can have a great meal for not much more than you'd pay for an ordinary one."