You Are What You Eat

How Food Became Our Favorite Way to Travel

There's an old adage that says you are what you eat. If that's true, then between the two of us we're made up of haggis, squid ink pasta, fresh anchovies, and a fried cod cake that stopped one of us cold in a tiny Italian fishing village.

Food has become one of our favorite ways to travel. Not in a food-tour, restaurant-reservation, must-eat-here kind of way — though we love those too — but in the spontaneous, point-and-smile, let's-just-see-what-arrives kind of way. Some of our most vivid travel memories have nothing to do with a landmark or a museum. They happened at a table.

The Planned Adventure: Haggis in Edinburgh

Some food experiences are intentional. Before our trip to Scotland, Scott made a decision: he was going to try haggis. Not because he was particularly convinced he'd enjoy it, but because it felt like the right thing to do. You go to Scotland, you try haggis. That's the deal.

We spent a good part of our time in Edinburgh hunting down a restaurant that actually had it on the menu — not as easy as you'd think — and eventually found one that did it properly. The verdict? Scott genuinely enjoyed it. Bobby, not so much. But that's almost beside the point. Trying it gave us both a real appreciation for Scottish culinary tradition and history in a way that no museum exhibit quite could.

Sometimes the meal is the experience.

The Happy Accidents: Anchovies and Squid Ink

Other times the best food moments are completely unplanned.

On one trip through Tuscany we found ourselves driving through a string of remote villages when we spotted a small family-run restaurant that looked too good to pass by. We stopped. The family spoke very little English. Our Italian was limited at best. The menu was entirely in Italian with no translations, which meant our ordering strategy came down to pointing at words we didn't recognize and smiling hopefully.

Scott ended up with pasta alle alici — fresh anchovies. Now, if you'd asked him at home whether he liked anchovies, he would have said no, based entirely on a childhood memory of the canned variety. These were nothing like that. Fresh, delicate, perfectly prepared — he cleaned the plate.

Later that same trip, in Cinque Terre, Scott accidentally ordered squid ink pasta. When a bowl of jet-black pasta arrived in front of him he did what any polite traveler would do — he tried a forkful rather than disappoint the waiter. He fell instantly in love. We spent the rest of that trip hunting down every squid ink pasta dish we could find, and have been searching for it in specialty stores ever since. For the record, you can buy dried squid ink pasta online. We've confirmed this personally.

The Moment That Brought Bobby to Tears

This is the story we come back to most.

Bobby's heritage traces to the Italian coast, and he grew up eating fish and seafood prepared the way his family had always made it. When his grandmother passed away, the family tried for years to recreate her famous fried cod fish cakes — the centerpiece of their traditional Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes. No matter how hard they tried, something was always slightly off. The exact taste was gone.

Years later, on the edge of the small fishing village of Manarola in the Cinque Terre, Bobby ordered a seafood platter. In the center of the plate was a fried cake. He took a bite — and stopped.

It tasted exactly like his grandmother's. Exactly. After all those years of trying to recreate it at home, there it was, on a plate in a village his grandmother had never visited, made by hands she'd never shaken. It brought him to tears right there at the table.

Food connects us to places. But sometimes it connects us to people we've lost, and that is something no itinerary can plan for.

Go For It

The lesson we keep coming back to is simple: be brave at the table. Order the thing you can't pronounce. Try the dish that sounds unfamiliar. Say yes when the waiter recommends something you've never heard of.

Travel already asks us to step outside our comfort zone. Food is just one more beautiful way to do it — and the rewards, as we've learned again and again, can be completely unexpected.

Grandpa Bobby & Grandpa Scott