Truly Authentic Food Experiences in Chianti
Title: | Truly Authentic Food Experiences in Chianti | |||||||
Category: | Cultural Experiences on Our Chianti Vacations | |||||||
Author: | Daniele Pintaudi | Updated: | Jan 30, 2019 | Views: | 4,881 | |||
Tags: | authentic food food experience tuscany homemade food tuscany |
When you travel, you find two kinds of food: The Authentic Cuisine, and the Tourist Cuisine.
The tourist cuisine is there to make people feel comfortable and more at home, but it robs people of one of the greatest part of the travel experience. In other words, what is the point of going to Rome and having dinner at The Hard Rock Cafe? Or having lunch at McDonald's?
In heavy tourist areas, even the places you may think are authentic, are not. Places pop up all over the world to give you the feeling that it is real, but it also gives you the comfort feeling of back home. In other words, if you are in Mexico, and you eat in a restaurant that reminds you of a Mexican restaurant back home, it probably isn't the real deal. Similarly, Italian restaurants in Italy won't be very much like Italian restaurants abroad.
The problem with the places that cater to the comfort tourists is that their primary goal is not authenticity, or even quality. It is all about getting a one-time customer in the door. Think about it, if most of their customers will only visit the city once, they really don't need to be good. They just need to be attractive and inviting. So they can spend their money on getting you in the door (marketing, decor, etc), and save it on costly high quality food.
A place that doesn't cater to the comfort tourists is all about quality, because they cater to the locals, and have to give them a reason to come back over and over. So you get authentic, high quality food.
On ALL of our vacations, we go for quality and authenticity. That means you will not find butter with your bread in Italy (Italians don't butter their bread), but the Buffalo mozzarella will be the real deal. You may not see "chicken fingers" on the menu, but the Chicken Marsala will be the best you will ever have in your life.
We are about FOOD, all the way. It is our biggest single expense, because we pull out all of the stops. After all, if you are eating well, we have you half way to total bliss :-)