When in Rome

On eating abroad. An essay from writer Tom Fish.

A rare meal in Morocco which hadn't been tagine'd.

Hello! I’m in the middle of a 2 week trip abroad, so today I have an essay from Tom Fish , a London-based travel writer. He writes Tom Fish is Away, a Substack about London and afar that doesn’t actually give you many recommendations. It’s a fun read about travel that is “less navel-gazing and more awkward urinal encounters. But you will also find interviews with fellow writers about their travel habits.”

Regularly scheduled will be returning next week.

“When in Rome,” as the saying goes, “do as the Romans do.” Well, when I’m in Rome I’m less concerned by what the Romans are doing as by what they are eating. I don’t want the know-how about the Colosseum or the Pantheon or the Vatican, I want to know where the Romans are eating and what they’re eating when they’re there. 

The last time I was in Rome I shovelled cacio e pepe and spaghetti carbonara down my throat like I hadn’t eaten in the last week. Since I hadn’t been in Italy that last week I suppose I hadn’t. Eating at home is fine and can, sometimes, even be nice, but it isn’t eating abroad which is by far the best kind of eating. 

The main reason it’s the best is that you don’t have to do the cooking. Being away is wonderful because of the weather and the things to do and the strange but friendly people of the place you are in. But primarily it’s wonderful because you don’t have to do any chores and the worst chore of all for a foodie is cooking. Alright, I suppose some foodies like cooking. That’s why they’d call themselves foodies. They like everything about food, including its cooking. I don’t. I like eating and I like eating best when I’ve not had to lift a hand to make what I’m eating. 

Because I’m happy to let the restaurateurs and the chefs of wherever I happen to find myself do the cooking, this also means leaning into the traditions of eating where I am. This means that in Spain I will find myself eating tapas at eleven at night even though doing so feels like being force-fed really nice midnight snacks. Rather big midnight snacks because I lean so heavily into tapas culture when in Spain I fail to notice that I’m not in a tapas restaurant, and start ordering starters by the dozen. 

Spain is perhaps the happiest country for me to eat in because it combines really amazing food with the fact that there is lots of it. This doesn’t happen in London where the better the food is the less you seem to get of it. This for me makes it less good because although I’ll have three or four exquisite mouthfuls, having done so I’ll look down to find my plate is as empty as my stomach. 

I found a tapas restaurant in Barcelona that included as one of its options an entire burger. This wasn’t a small burger or even some of those silly little sliders that pubs have started pumping out to be different. It was a full burger in the Spanish style: fully loaded and liable to cause serious health problems down the line. So obviously I ordered it along with five or six other dishes that could have each fed a family of four. 

Technically tapas - an absolutely enormous portion of Valencian nachos.

Then there’s somewhere like Berlin, where there isn’t tapas but there is currywurst. Currywurst should be the most unappetising food known to man and, if you’re a vegetarian, it almost certainly is. It’s sausage that doesn’t just taste processed, but so ultra-processed that it’s liable to give those new superfood gurus that seem to be everywhere and inescapable these days heart palpitations just by them thinking about it. So as you will have probably predicted by now I love it. I was in Berlin for a week and had it five times, including in the airport as I left which stretched even my fondness for it. 

But Berlin isn’t all currywurst and blocked arteries, there are also falafel wraps as far as the eye can see. Don’t forget the halloumi and baba ganoush that often accompany or join the falafel in these wraps. Because an even better kind of eating abroad is when the abroad in question is cosmopolitan, has cuisines coming out of its ears, has options and choices galore. 

I live in London and so those of you familiar with this big old city will probably think that what I’m describing sounds an awful lot like home. And I am in a way, I suppose, but being home means that I have a home there and that means that I have a kitchen and so I often, much to my chagrin, end up having to make the food myself. Being abroad somehow makes it acceptable to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner out of the house, because you have no house. Three meals a day for a week, say, means there’s twenty one opportunities to have a lovely time. But these twenty one meals show why variety is both a good thing and necessary. 

A lack of variety is the only time when eating abroad can get tedious. Nine days in Morocco earlier in the year has pushed my love of tagine to breaking point. Before I flew off to Marrakesh everyone said, oh, the food, the cuisine, how wonderful, how lovely. And for about three days they were right. But after about day four, opening a menu to find wall-to-wall tagine got so dispiriting I started dreaming heretical dreams about McDonald’s and Pizza Express. 

Tagine, tagine, tagine, that's all Morocco is. This one's full of peas but it's still a tagine.

Which brings me to my next point, which is that eating abroad can get tiresome. Tedious and tiresome aren’t two words that I often use when describing eating but when abroad it can be if we’re honest. I could lie and say it’s wonderful all the time, but it isn’t. It’s tiresome because somewhere in the middle of twenty one opportunities you’ll realise you don’t want any more opportunities. You want certainty and, above all, to not have to talk to anyone to get fed. The one good thing about cooking at home is that all it takes is opening the fridge, picking something out, and doing something with it, boiling, frying, flambeeing, and then you’re eating. Abroad there are endless conversations and arguments and compromises to be had before you find the right place, order the right thing and pay the right amount. 

And so: McDonald’s. Hear me out. Sometimes it’s fine to eat it abroad. And I don’t just mean McDonald’s but Starbucks and Pizza Hut and Domino’s too. Name your fast food poison and I say, every so often eat it. I’ve eaten at fast food chains in Rome, Madrid, Casablanca, you name it I’ll have scoffed something greasy there. A lot of these chains have started having you order through a screen so it’s bliss for the weary traveler sick of human contact. 

But you can’t get into the habit of eating Big Macs too often. Everybody knows that. A burger may be fine when it’s tapas but when it’s in a Happy Meal it doesn’t quite have the same allure. 

And so to the final but best thing about eating abroad: finding that amazing local restaurant that no one seems to know about but that does amazing food. So much of traveling when you love eating is searching for these mythical places that are incredibly hard to find, if they even exist at all. That’s because you can guarantee that if a restaurant has appeared in blogs or on social media it will no longer be an amazing local restaurant that no one knows about. It will be an amazing local restaurant that everyone knows about, and so the “local” goes out the window almost immediately, and quite often this is swiftly followed by the “amazing” too.

But every so often you might stumble upon somewhere that really does seem secret. The service might be nice and the food might be amazing, and for the next two hours all is well in the world. Travel can so often be a thankless activity filled with disappointment and letdowns, but not when you have the good fortune to be somewhere nice. There are few things I’d like to do more than sit in a nice restaurant eating amazing food in a strange and wonderful part of the world. 

Especially since I don’t have to do the cooking.