26-03-2025
The Tourist Hops From Place To Place, While The True Traveler Re-Visits Places Full Of Fond Memories
I have a friend who has enough time and money to travel as she wishes and over a lifetime has visited more cities and countries than anyone I know. She budgets her time to spend exactly one hour touring the Louvre, 45 minutes to eat at a trattoria in Rome and two hours to sun bathe on a beach in Bali. Then she comes home and sticks colored pins into a map of the world for all to see. Yet she never returns to anywhere she's ever been. London? Done it. Tokyo? Been there. Rio de Janeiro? Seen it. She will rave about a restaurant she was at twenty years ago but never seek to eat there again.
As a food and travel writer I try to be careful about recommending hotels or restaurants, even sights, I haven't been to in the last few years, and I remember being appalled at how Vancouver, BC,
which once had a marvelous low-lying cityscape and background of stunning forests and mountains, had on my return been made over with walls of high-rise buildings of no distinction blotting out much of the view. Bangkok was once called the 'Venice of the East' for its extensive canal system, now almost entirely paved over in exchange for. . . high-rise buildings.
Though I'm still trying to cross off cities on my bucket list, the older I get the more I realize I won't be able to set foot in every country on earth. Yet I am also more than ever eager to return to places I have visited in the past, perhaps several times. The pleasure of travel, staying in a hotel and eating out is not only about seeing new things but about revisiting what you loved about a place. This could be based on a romantic memory in Lisbon, a trek through gorgeous scenery in Switzerland or a perfect meal out in a Louisiana bayou.
There might well be disappointments in such returns, as when a ride is removed at Disneyland that I thrilled to when I was ten years old, or a restaurant in Copenhagen who switched from traditional Danish cooking to a menu of molecular cuisine. And sometimes the memory is fogged by finding a favorite room in a historic New England inn isn't nearly as comfortable as it seemed or the food much good at all.
Sometimes it might not matter: if only I could find the third-floor walk-up room in a Parisian pension where I spent three blissful days with a wonderful Oklahoma girl I'd met at a museum in New York, I'd experience as much joy as in visiting my boyhood apartment in the Bronx.
Indeed, time being fleeting, rather than search out the hot new vegetarian eatery in Vienna, I take much more pleasure going back for the perfect Wiener Schnitzel and tafelspitz at Plachuttas Gasthaus zur Opera. I would never visit Venice without hoisting a bellini cocktail and eating the wonderful risotto con seppie and tagliatelle gratinata atHarry's Bar. And were I in Taipei I wouldn't miss a chance to visit Night Market with endless stalls serving up exotica that includes 'Stinky Tofu.'
I don't really care about eating Japanese food in Milan or Italian food in Mumbai. I don't even really care to eat Sicilian food in Rome or Niçoise food in Alsace. I want to seek out the best a particular food culture has to offer.
Back in 1977 for our honeymoon, my wife and I drove across American and back in a leisurely fashion (fourteen weeks), and, given our modest resources, stayed in small hotels and inns of regional charm, getting educated about the different styles of barbecue from Lexington, Kentucky, to Lockhart, Texas. We attended crab boils in Maryland and boucheries in Louisiana. And although it will never be repeated, I count as one of the finest meals of my life for a breakfast at a misty hanging lake in Colorado with Basque cowboys who cooked up campfire pancakes, bacon, lamb chops and pots of strong coffee.
I yearn to return to eat tacos in the
Mercado in San Miguel Allende, Mexico, and the extraordinary rich vegetarian fare at the truck stop named Sharma Dhabu in Jaipur. In Paris I have at least six bistros and brasseries I always frequent and usually order the signature dishes like the beef tartare and frites at Montparnasse's La Rotonde and the Dover sole at Le Dome, the pig's trotter at Au Pied de Cochon at Les Halles near the Pompidou Center, and the cri spy sweetbreads at Chez Georges on the Rue de Mail.
Settings that haven't changed much in decades are always a draw for me because what I liked about them on my first visit has been retained on successive visits, like the downstairs cave-like dining room at Botin in Madrid, the barebones décor of La Campagna in Rome, the Teutonic trappings of The Berghoff in Chicago and the refreshed and now pristine dining room of Galatoire's in New Orleans.
As everyone knows, fondly remembered dishes stay with you always, so I rush to eat them again at places that haven't changed the recipe in decades, like the lasagne alla bolognese at Trattoria dal Biassanot in Bologna; the huge portion of choucroute in Le Tire-Bouchon in Strasbourg; the frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity 3 in New York; and the Irish coffee at the Buena Vista Bar in San Francisco.
You might have noticed that many of these places I've mentioned attract large numbers of tourists––who keep them thriving––which doesn't concern me as it does when American abroad insist on visiting another iteration of Hard Rock Café in Buenos Aires or Del Frisco's steakhouse in Las Vegas.
I, too, was a tourist once, and I did search out the most heralded hotels and restaurants abroad, at first very cheap ones recommended by the guidebook Europe on $5 a Day(which was wholly possible back in the 1960s). I wanted to eat where Hemingway ate in Paris, like Brasserie Lipp, and where Sam Spade at in The Maltese Falcon––John's Grillin San Francisco. I tried to dine at as many restaurants and stay in as many hotels as I could afford in the James Bond novels and films, from '21' Club in New York to the Danieli Hotel in Octopussy.
I know that once a hotel or restaurant appears in a movie, whether the Plaza Hotel in Home Alone 2, or its Oak Bar in North by Northwest they become as iconic for tourists as Vienna's Ferris wheel in The Third Man and Sacher Hotel in the same movie.
But like my friend who only visits any place once for a peek, those sights may not beg a second visit. Those that do become personal favorites make re-visiting them, staying in the same room and eating the same dishes may well be the most rewarding part of a true traveler's itinerary. For the receptive heart and soul traveling is not about pins on a map but about the remembrance of the best of things past.
