Foreign Fare: Dining Abroad Makes For

Foreign fare: Dining abroad makes for memorable moments.

What, exactly, are you eating? Is it chicken, liver or chicken liver?

Eating in a foreign country can vary from the sublime to the ridiculous. The sublime is lingering over dinner at a restaurant in France where you consume one edible delight after another for hours on end.

The ridiculous is believing you have ordered lemonade at a Portuguese version of a Maverik Country Store, only to be brought tea with a wedge of lemon.

Dining becomes even more of an adventure if you're visiting a country where the menu includes items you've never heard of.

In Japan, for example, a traditional dinner will have so many courses that you'll probably lose count and might include such things as fermented bean paste, burdock root, a celery-like vegetable called fuki and fiddlehead fern powder.

Anyone who has traveled abroad probably has a gastronomic war story. But for the most part, eating while on foreign soil includes only a few sour notes in an otherwise melodious symphony.

We asked a few of our clients about their experiences with food while they were on the road. Here's what they said:

When in Rome . . .

In Italy, eating is an art. What Italians perceive as a meal and what Americans think of as dining out are entirely different. Eating in Italy has a certain mystique. The contrast isn't so much what they serve as the order they serve it in. "The first time I went there, I sat down in a very elegant restaurant with Italian friends and ordered spaghetti, a little salad and a few other things," he said. "The spaghetti came first and the salad was last." Typically, you'll have at least seven courses, maybe 11, and you'll probably be there three hours. The country of pasta and Parmesan is my favorite place to dine.

Speaking of parmesan, in the United States the pungent cheese is treated like gold. Waiters come to your table with a small chunk and parcel it out like a Scotsman handing out spare change. In Italy, "they bring out Mount Vesuvius. "They bring you a mountain of cheese."

On the lamb

Another client recalls a meal in Guilin, China. She selected a dessert from the lazy susan in the center of the table. "It was bite-size and looked safe since it appeared to be coated with large pieces of crystallized sugar," she said. "It was sugar on the outside, but I chewed and chewed and chewed on the filling. It wouldn't go down. I finally gave up and discreetly transferred the remains to my napkin. I learned through a translator that it was

sugar-coated cartilage from a lamb's tail — a real delicacy in China."

One of our agents remembers escorting 120 people on a shore excursion in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico. She had booked a jungle tour with local vendors. "After riding up to the waterfalls on horseback, we had a catered lunch. Everybody enjoyed the food but most commented on the flavor of the chicken. When I was loading everybody back on the boats to head back to the ship, the Mexicans told me they used iguana meat." I didn’t have the heart or stomach to tell everyone.

When in Lisbon, dine with a man

Another client recalled escorting a group of girls through Portugal and Spain. They waited 1 1/2 hours to be served at a restaurant in Lisbon. She later found out that if you have a man at your table, you're more likely to get fast service.

A couple visiting Portugal had a rude awakening. "There you're charged extra for each item on the table. If you have extra sugar or sour cream, you're charged for it.

"This couple was on a budget. They ordered soup. But they also asked for bread, butter and marmalade. When they got their bill, it was twice what they expected."

Another recounted a story of her own. She had been given the wrong plate at a restaurant in a small town in Brazil. "I mentioned it to the waiter. He looked around the table and went to another lady in our group who had already eaten from her plate. He took the plate from her and brought it to me. He didn't understand why I wouldn't accept it."

And then there was a group she was with through France, which considers itself the world's culinary capital. The group ate at the same hotel every day. "We had one lady who refused to eat meat unless it was well done," she recalled.

"Whenever she ordered meat, she specifically stated 'well done.' She often had the waiter return the meat to the kitchen to recook it. This went on for five days. On the sixth day . . . the waiter came out carrying a plate with a boot on it and set it down in front of her. He told her 'you wanted well done, well you got it.

A lady client said when she was a nanny, she visited the Caribbean island of Dominica with the family she worked for. They sat down to dinner one evening and both the husband and his wife encouraged her to order mountain chicken. "It came, it looked like chicken wings," she recalled. "Well, after I had completed eating all of them I was informed I had just eaten frog legs. All I could think of was Kermit with no legs!"

English spoken poorly here

Sometimes, menus in foreign countries are accompanied by an English translation that may be misleading. A client who travels to Central and South America, laughed over a

menu translation he encountered in a cafe in the southern reaches of Patagonia. His friend Fida, who was born in Argentina, speaks Spanish like a native. The Spanish word for potato is "papa." The Spanish term for the pope is "El Papa." The English translation on the menu listed fried pope instead of fried potatoes, smashed pope instead of mashed potatoes, and baked pope instead of baked potato. "We were laughing so hard we couldn't talk to the waiter," he said. Another English translation that didn't ring true: hog cutlets fried in lard. Somehow, that sounds less appetizing than fried pork chops.

But the tables can turn if you're from a foreign country visiting the United States. Fida and his wife were eating dinner with friends at a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix. "I had never had Mexican food," he said. "They suggested I order a taco. I didn't know what to say because in Spanish "taco" means the heel of your shoe. I didn't order the taco because I thought they would bring me a little chunk of wood covered in leather."

Colleen and I were in France and were looking for a good seafood dinner. We saw this restaurant that on the outside had this large display on ice of their seafood. This must be the place so in we went. We sat at a small table about 3 inches on one side from 2 gentlemen and on the other 4 inches from a couple. The men were from Germany and England. The couple was from Spain, truly international. We ordered what we thought was a sauté seafood dish. Now would you not think that France would be the place to taste some great sauté? Well……we were brought a large dish that was put on a pedestal because of the table size and all the extra room we had. Under the pedestal was the bread, utilizing all the space. The dish had crap, oysters, two types of clams, 4 sizes of snails, (is snails seafood?), some type of sea urchin, and several other things we couldn’t decide what it was. Now this was all served on ice, just like the displays showed outside. Oh, yes they were raw also. This was told to me from Colleen as she had just put a clam in her mouth and was trying not to chew. That part I enjoyed the most. We tried to be the good Americans and ate a little of all, well almost all. Yes the wine was great and so was the bread.

Give yourself a chance to try some things and I promise those will be the things you will remember the most. Not the burger at the McDonalds in Paris that tasted almost like the burger at your McDonalds in your home town.

You will remember the things you took a chance on more then the things you didn’t.