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Does Food Just Taste Better on the Road, or Is It Actually Better? Yes.
By Jim Shahin
This is the best pizza I have ever eaten. The best gelato too. The best Parmesan cheese. Maybe even the best pasta. Probably not the best pasta. Definitely not, come to think of it. The homemade tagliatelle with white truffles at the little no-frills trattoria in the countryside of Emilia-Romagna, Italy — that was the best pasta.
That this plate, though, is even being considered as the best tells you something.
Now, here’s the thing:
All of those items — the pizza, the gelato, the Parmesan, the pasta — were experienced not throughout the whole of Italy but in one town in South America. Granted, it was a big town. Still, just one town: Buenos Aires.
While that may recommend Argentina’s European-esque seaside city to gourmands and/or Italophiles, the thing it really does is call into question my judgment.
“Dad,” my teenage son, Sam, began. “Do you think this really is the best, or do you think food just tastes better when you are traveling?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes?” he responded. “What kind of answer is that?”
“The only answer,” I said. “Food does taste better when you are traveling. But this really is the best pizza I’ve ever had. And the best gelato. And the best Parmesan cheese.”
It’s true that maybe I was getting carried away with the moment. Here we were, my son, my wife, and I, traveling together in one of the world’s great cities. The temperature could not have been better if we had set the thermostat ourselves. The serendipity of coming across a street fair here and an outdoor flea market there seduced us into believing that life would always be like this if only we could afford the hotel bill to remain here forever.
So it was not inconceivable that I was drunk on love and therefore wrong about foodstuffs.
What if, for example, I had eaten the exact same pizza in my hometown? The exact same crispy yet chewy thin crust? The exact same perfectly herbed tomato topping? The exact same cheese, the exact same amount of it (not too much, not too scant)? I would like to think that I would recognize it as a wondrous thing. But would I declare it the best I ever had?
Who knows?
What I do know, however, is that the exact same pizza does not exist in my hometown. If it exists in New Haven, Connecticut, regarded by pizza cognoscenti as perhaps America’s best pizza city, or New York, or even the birthplace of pizza, Naples, I haven’t had it, and I’ve had pizza in all those places.
So, being wrong is not inconceivable, but it’s not likely either.
Which brings me back to my question.
Are certain dishes simply better on the road, or does the road make them seem that way?
I once asked a Lebanese woman at a Middle Eastern import store why the tabbouleh in Lebanon tasted so much better than the tabbouleh here in the States. Was it just that I was eating it in the country of its origins, or was it that the tabbouleh really was better there?
Tabbouleh, after all, is just chopped parsley, mint, scallions, and tomatoes, and a little bulgur — emphasis on little — dressed with lemon and olive oil. How could one be all that much better than the other?
The parsley, she answered without missing a beat.
The parsley?
It’s different, she said. Here, the leaves of the flat-leaf parsley are thick. There, they are delicate. The flavor is different, she said. More sweet.
So, there are differences in flat-leaf parsley. Who knew?
Ingredients make a difference, of course. But I think there is something more to the answer than that.
I have eaten a zillion chopped-pork-barbecue sandwiches in North Carolina alone, North Carolina being the capital of chopped-pork-barbecue sandwiches. They are all made with pork. But the ones served at the tiny Skylight Inn in minuscule Ayden, North Carolina, stand out above the rest.
As you travel this summer, you will come across a sublime dish of something that you’ve had lots of times before. And you may think it is the best of its kind you have ever had. And you may well be right.
’Course, you may also have tasted the best of its kind in your own hometown and just not have noticed.
Either way, that pizza, that gelato, that Parmesan cheese in Buenos Aires, I’m tellin’ ya, they are the best I’ve ever had.
Not the best in the world, mind you. For I haven’t tried every version of them on this planet.
But they could be.
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