Held Prisoner in an Italian Restaurant

Eating in Italy is one of the better things you can do in life, as we've reported on several occassions in the past. We hear people over here complaining about the food all the time, saying they get better food in San Francisco or New York. These people are idiots and don't know what they're doing. Ordering polenta in Naploli, or Eggplant in Milan probably isn't going to work out well, since most of Italian cuisine in regional. Do some research, eat the local specialties and you'll be fine.


Italian restaurants move at their own pace, often very slow. In this regard, I can understand the frustration with travellers, especially ones with a tight schedule. Fortunately, we have no schedule, so a 2 hour lunch is fine with us.


But there have been 2 notable exceptions.

In our firt go around in Siena, we went to a little hole in the wall place (in Italy, they're all holes in the walls). After getting screwed out an outdoor seat by the hot guy, we got stuck in the back of the restaurant with the other Americans. No big deal. We were hungry and wanted to eat.

So we perused the menu and choose our food. Some rabbit, some pasta, some veal. Then we waited for the waitress to come.

And we waited.

And we waited.

Since Italian service i slow, I didn't want to look like some American who couldn't deal. So we waited some more. It was an on-going discussion as to how long we should wait. We decided 30 minutes was enough.

When I went to talk to the bar, they were shocked, SHOCKED, that we hadn't been helped and he would help us personally. They then proceeded to tell us that half the menu was no longer available.

In the end, the food was good and I got a free glass of Vin Santo (sweet dessert wine) out of it, but it was annoying none the less.

The second instance happened just the other night here in Lucca. We had a great meal, including raviolli, papparadalle, and cutlets milanese.

Once we finished, we asked for the check. And waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

At this point, we were trying to do everything we could to get the waitress' attention, including staring, waiving money, etc. She obviously thought it was someone else's reponsibility to get us the check, you know, like the fairy godmother.

After 20 minutes (I learned a little bit from the first time), we finally asked for the check again. The waitres acted like it was the first time we asked and promptly brought the check over.

The problem in both these situations is you can't do anything. We could have left the restaurant without ordering, but on a sleepy Sunday evening, we ran the chance of there being no other available retaurants. And we could have walked out on the check, but really, we couldn't.

We're learning the Italian way, but it has its limits. Next time, maybe we'll only wait 15 minutes.