When Hunger Gets the Best of You - Roman Style
Have you ever been so hungry and tired from walking around, burning all those calories, that your mind starts playing tricks on you and as a result bad decisions were made? Well, this happened to my boyfriend and I in Rome.
After our 3 hour Vatican Tour that started at 8:30AM (terrific and one of the coolest places I’ve been hands down), we were utterly starving. Walking around the streets of Vatican City, we were looking for a place to eat. Little did we know, there are no restaurants in this 109 acres of sacred ground. Just as we were making our way further and further away from St. Peter’s Square, we spotted a petit olive skinned woman with wavy black hair pulled back into a loose bun handing out fliers.
As we walked past her, we heard, “freshly made pizza and pasta!” in English. First sign that it’s a trap! I paused and did a double take. Oh! How I wish I didn’t! Because as soon as I hesitated, Pierre also paused. We walked back to the lady and despite thinking in the back of my head that this was probably a trap, we began chatting her up. BAD IDEA.
Thrilled, she handed us a copy of the English takeout menu. It looked very typical and very touristy. But what do you do when you are hungry and tired? You make bad decisions! To make matters worse, she sensed the French accent from Pierre.
“You are French?” she said in French to Pierre. And that was like opening a can of big worms that cannot be put back in. Turns out, the lady was from Algeria and most of her family have immigrated to France. I knew she was trying to use this fact to get close to us and ruse us to the restaurant. And of course, we fell for it.
“Follow me! The restaurant is very close. We just have to get out of Vatican City first and back to Rome.” she said in English. But then the rest of our 5 minute walk to the restaurant, Pierre and her conversed in French.
A combination of hunger, fatigue, the fact that she was a fellow Algerian French, and hustling so hard to get customers into this restaurant, we agreed to eat there. BAD IDEA.
She sat us down on a typical European cafe-style table outside. Pierre was a bit dubious since there were only two tables outside of our restaurant and all the restaurants next to us had proper tables and chairs with at least six sets in a row with outdoor umbrellas. There were so many signs that this was a BAD IDEA but we ignored it all.
After examining the menu, we decided to order prosciutto melon to start and lasagna and ham pizza as entrees. It took about a good 25 minutes before the food came out; and immediately, we were disappointed. The prosciutto melon didn’t look exactly fresh: the melon was fine and juicy but the prosciutto had a tint of dark brown, like it has been exposed to room temperature air for awhile. My lasagna looked super basic and unappetizing. There was nothing special in it, just the regular ground beef and cheese with a giant blob of tomato sauce. Pierre was convinced that it was a frozen lasagna that they heated briefly before serving. And the most disappointing of all was the poorly made pizza. It had one small slice of ham and one small slice of sausage the size of a five-year old’s fist. The entire pizza was about 8’ of a pie and that’s all it had! Pathetic two slices of ham and sausage chilling out in one corner. So sad.
Nonetheless, we made the best out of it and enjoyed the beautiful weather and the magical vibes of Rome. Unfortunately, Pierre’s feeling about the lasagna being frozen and the my suspicions about the prosciutto being out in the air too much were correct. We had stomach issues, but not quite full-on food poisoning few hours later in the early evening. And worst part is, this meal costed the most out of all of our food experience and had a mandatory ridiculous high service charge!
Because of this not-so-great experience, I was determined to turn our food experience around. I refused to believe that the food in Rome was bad! There’s no way, even with my spoiled NYC taste buds that this was the case. And lucky for us, we found a fabulous home-cooking style restaurant half a block from our hotel and our food experiences from then-on took off exponentially thereafter.
