In the fall of 1995, my mother treated me to a four-city tour of Italy. From Rome to Milan, we traveled the country, enjoying the historic sites and making plenty of friends along the way.
Since neither of us spoke Italian, we ran into the occasional language barrier – but nothing too terrible. We felt the worst of it after I accidentally left our tickets on the train in Florence, and we had to argue with the American Express agent (who, ironically, didn’t speak a word of English) to have them replaced. But that was the worst it got, and our issue still got resolved with a smile.
The food we enjoyed was fabulous – spaghetti from a sidewalk café in Rome, pizza in (you guessed it) Pisa, wine everywhere. The two days we spent in Venice, our bellies were full of fresh seafood and wine. But on our last day there we both grew a little homesick, and after a day’s worth of sightseeing we found ourselves craving a good old-fashioned American burger and fries.
We knew it was a longshot, but we stopped in at a small café just off the main walk and checked the menu. To our surprise, “American Burger and Fries” was on the menu! We ordered and waited, along with a three-legged cat that apparently protected the place from shady visitors. The cat decided we were okay, and limped off as the waiter brought us our food. That’s when the real surprise hit us.
As it turns out, the Venice version of an “American Burger and Fries” is a patty of ground beef, no bun, with hash browns and a lot of ketchup. After we finished laughing, we polished off our plates and set off back to the hotel – with our bellies full of the weirdest burgers we’d ever had and an awfully fun story to tell.
Since neither of us spoke Italian, we ran into the occasional language barrier – but nothing too terrible. We felt the worst of it after I accidentally left our tickets on the train in Florence, and we had to argue with the American Express agent (who, ironically, didn’t speak a word of English) to have them replaced. But that was the worst it got, and our issue still got resolved with a smile.
The food we enjoyed was fabulous – spaghetti from a sidewalk café in Rome, pizza in (you guessed it) Pisa, wine everywhere. The two days we spent in Venice, our bellies were full of fresh seafood and wine. But on our last day there we both grew a little homesick, and after a day’s worth of sightseeing we found ourselves craving a good old-fashioned American burger and fries.
We knew it was a longshot, but we stopped in at a small café just off the main walk and checked the menu. To our surprise, “American Burger and Fries” was on the menu! We ordered and waited, along with a three-legged cat that apparently protected the place from shady visitors. The cat decided we were okay, and limped off as the waiter brought us our food. That’s when the real surprise hit us.
As it turns out, the Venice version of an “American Burger and Fries” is a patty of ground beef, no bun, with hash browns and a lot of ketchup. After we finished laughing, we polished off our plates and set off back to the hotel – with our bellies full of the weirdest burgers we’d ever had and an awfully fun story to tell.
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