As the days tick down to our departure for Italy, I'm wondering whether it is necessary to order multiple courses at every restaurant (at dinner). I've read many wonderful reviews, and gone to websites to see the menus of some restaurants, and I just can't imagine myself eating 3 or 4 courses every evening for 12 days in a row! Don't get me wrong - I have no intention of dieting while in the land of great cuisine, but I just can't eat that much and still enjoy the experience. I also don't eat red meat (although poultry and fish are ok), which limits the number of "secondi" I can eat. Is it out of the question to order a primi and contorni, but no secondi? Will I be given the bum's rush out of decent restaurants? Please help with any food etiquette for an Italy newbie. Thanks!
If you don't feel like eating a multi-course meal, it's perfectly acceptable to only eat one course, or to pick and choose which courses you do eat!
If you only feel like a plate of pasta, then it's fine just to have a plate of pasta. I have often done this!
Italians seem to just be able to eat and eat and eat. It took me about a month of my aunt's multi-course lunches for me to be able to eat more than just a sample every dish. Now, after four months here, not only do I eat every dish - I have seconds too!
The whole "you're expected to order at least three courses" thing that was mentioned in the clearly inaccurate "tips for Italy" article we tore apart here earlier this week is a bunch of baloney.
When you go to a restaurant in Italy, order what you want and eat what you want. I have never seen a restaurant owner balk at someone eating only a primi and a salad, a pizza only, a primi only, etc.
If you do get the "bum's rush", it's likely that it's a very touristy place and it's not a place you'll want to revisit anyway.
There would be an exception to this for the finer (I'm talking very fine, and very expensive) establishments where you're going for a gastronomic experience. But most places you're likely to eat, I assume, will not be 4 star establishments.
I only had three + courses one night my whole trip. The rest usually involved some sort of antipasti or salad and then pasta occasionally with shellfish or other types of fish mixed in. We were never looked down upon that I could tell for doing this, even in the fancier places we ate one or two nights.
+ dessert. how could I forget that!
Posts: 110 | Location: NJ | Registered: 27 January 2006
Though there are multiple courses, the portions are NOT American sized! They are much smaller and spread out so that when you leave the ristorante, you do not feel "stuffed" but "satisfied" as it was enough. Dinner will take you two hours to eat unlike the US that will try to get you fed and out the door in 35 minutes!!
As Marco says, you don't have to order it all if you don't want. If there are two dishes you like in the "primi" section of the menu, just tell the waiter.."per primi ha...." and "per secondi ha... and mention the other primi dish you want!" You can order anything and remember, they will NEVER bring you the bill until you ask for it..."Il conte por favore!"
Don't be afraid by the process as you will get no more food over all that time than if you went out to Outback and ordered a meal, even though it takes 2 courses to do it in Italy!!
FYI... we always ordered a primi and a secondi but rarely, if ever, did an antipasti and occasionally we had a dolce... but gelato was better!!
Buon viaggi e buon appetito!
Doug
Doug
ANCORA IMPARO
Posts: 2108 | Location: Winter Park, FL | Registered: 18 May 2005
Another thing you can do is order a "mezzo" portion (half portion) of pasta. You can also share courses. My husband and I often shared an antipasto to begin our meal. We would also share our contorni. And we didn't fill up on bread, like we often do in the USA.
We enjoyed sampling the different courses and also enjoyed the more leisurely meal.
It also helps to choose one meal (lunch or dinner) as your "big" meal of the day.
The rule "you're expected to order at least three courses" was actually accurate twenty or thirty years ago. At the time every restaurant expected customers to have a complete meal.
Since then restaurant prices have gone up and people have become diet conscious, so many restaurants have added to their menus a dietetic alternative to main dishes (say, a salad selection, including salads that are an almost complete meal in themselves). So most people will order a primo and a salad or a salad, or skip the primo - and the rule is no more valid.
I often order only contorni, but many of them. I sometimes select restaurants based on whether thay have good contorni. That said, I think visitors probably like to order a primo because this is after all the home of pasta, risotto, ribollita... an antipasto bar can seduce me away from contorni, if it's good. Contorno means what you would call a side dish, perhaps. When you order in other countries, those often appear automatically, but they usually do not here. So, it's a bit of a cheat to call it another course and gives the impression of more food than you are really ordering. And then there are those restaurants without menus, where they just keep bringing food until you sob with exhaustion. One of those in a country setting may satisfy your curiosity about the truly huge feast meal. Often in cities they aren't that good, however. They seem more for tourists or for people who go out to dine once a year.
The whole multicoruse thing is a historical fake. One century ago most people only had one course with each meal, and that course was often bread plus a vegetable. Rich people had meals made of a HUGE number of courses, like a few antipasto courses, a soup, a pasta or rice course, a "tramesso", one fish secondo, one meat or poultry secondo, each with one or more contorno, and a dessert. But these were the rich people, those who got themselves gout and suffered from excess food intake consequences. With better life conditions, the XX century saw the arrival of multi-course meals on most people tables', but only as festive meal. On any other day the meals are far simpler, ofte nased on a single main dish made of pasta or rice or meat or fish with a vegetable side: no antipasto, often no dessert, just a fruit.
At lunch most restaurants, especially on weekdays, serve workers from the earea who do not have time to go back home for lunch: people who expect to eat more or less like they would at home: a small portion of pasta (or meat) and some vegetables. At dinner time, obviously, the situaton is a bit different because we go to restaurants at night to celebrate something or to have a little party with friends. This means that at dinner resturnats often offer better dishes and people tend to eat moer, not just larger portions but more courses. Even in this case, unless you are picking a special menu (like the "menù degustazione"), you are nto epected to eat everything and to eat it in order.
Basically our meals are modular: we have a first coruse that is usually based on carbs (be them pasta or rice or polenta or a soup with some pasta or rice thrown in), a secondo that is usually based on proteins (meat, poultry, fish, eggs) and a vegetable side dish (a contorno, notice that often the secondo is not served with vegetables: if you order a steak you get served the steak only!), plus an optional antipasto and an optional desert (that can be a pastry or a fruit or cheese). Salads are considered contorno. Given this "fan" of possibilities you are free to compose your meal as you like it: you can order a salad as antipato, followed by a primo, followed by a vegetable side dish; or you may want some of that risotto, plus a steak, plus a slice of cake.
Finally, as others said, portions are not like the US ones. I have heard of one pound (about 500 grams) pasta portions for a single person, here the average restaurant pasta portion is 1/5 of that, ranging from 60 to 100 grams, mostly, with larger portions in Rome and in the south, and smaller portions up here in the north, and even the sauce ratio is different, less sauce per 100 grams than in the US.
I've met young men who actually ate about 500g of pasta, but in a restaurant? Agree that the Italian portions are about half what we'd get here, and a friend who was a young man from France ordered his pasta course twice!
decobabe, you have to do a restaurant review centred on contorni. I'm not a true vegetarian but eat far more veg than meat and indeed I remember lovely contorni in Umbria, and indeed it wasn't seen as rude to order more than one instead of a secondo.
Posts: 868 | Location: Montréal | Registered: 29 January 2006
Thank you so much to all who have responded to my food-anxiety question. I feel much better about the whole situation now. Two final questions: how would one ask to have my primo and my husband's secondo served at the same time? And how would we ask to share a course? (in the US, we might say, bring 2 forks, but I'm guessing that's not how it's done in Italy!) Thanks again.
To be brought at the same time, just say "insieme", but if there are two of you and the waiter sees an order with a pimo and a secondo, they will likely br brought more or less at the same time. I say more or less because most of the food is done "espresso", which means in real time, therefore cooking times could be different for different dishes, and you may even receive the one secondo before the one pasta. Since forks are already on the table as you arrive, you just either swap the dish or place it in the middle of the table and serve yourselves at the same time. No need to announce anything to the waiter, unless you want a second dish, in which case you ask for "un altro piatto".
One thing that I don't remeber has been said in this thread is that you don't have to order all at once Start out by ordering your antipasto (if you want it) and one primo or secondo. If you are still hungry, just order something more. Routinely, the waiter takes away the menu, but you can ask for it anytime if you want to order something else: why should they complain? You are buying more food!
My friend and I when lunching often order something special to share. We just say, "Condovidiamo la panzanella," and then order the rest of the meal separately. When I go to the cashier I then tell that I ate 1/2 of the panzanella then the rest of what I ate. Mind you, this is in a little osteria that wants our business, not a posh place, but I would still order that way in a posh place and expect them to divide the bill up appropriately. As to the contorni thing, I look at all the menus on the chalboards or the glass case where they display them to choose the restaurant. In Rome, I often eat the vegetarian antipasto at alla Carbonara in Camp di Fiori. Is that touristy? Probably, but I and the Roman ladies with their big gold necklaces like it anyway. I did recently post a review on a restaurant chosen for meal type salads! Not common enough here. And Alice, it wasn't so different where we are from either. Menus at the home of George Washington had gazillions of dishes and removes and was the single real meal of the day. The lower of us ate beans and cornbread.
As mentioned by many, the servings in Italian restaurants are not as large as you would find in the US.
On our first trip last year, we only ordered what we were hungry for and never had a problem or was given a "bum's rush" anywhere. Another helpful phrase I learned (from the Slow Travel website) was una per due. We used this more than once, but only for antipasti. It was never a problem.
Yet, as I stated above, unless you wnat a second plaate to divide your communal courses, you don't need to say anything because splitting is pretty common. On the other hand, if you want a second plate it's better to say "un altro piatto" than "uni per due" (to which a salacious waiter might reply "due", since it literally means one times two, while the line you would need if it was ever said in that instance is "uno IN due", but that's never said because it's so normal to share that the waiter essentially doesn't give a fig about it ).
How I love to talk about eating Italian food! My wife and I used to often overeat in Italy. We always wanted to taste so many different things! It took us many trips before we learned to share almost everything and eliminated much of the overeating.
The waiter at Antiche Carampane in Venice was very unhappy when we didn't want the full three courses. He was being so rude about it that I was ready to leave except we had company that night. We did end up having a great meal so I can't say I'm bitter over it.
Aside from that, I never had a problem just having a plate of pasta or risotto for lunch or dinner.
My appetite and my husband's don't quite jive - at his workplace he rarely gets lunch, and lunch tends to be my main meal. In general, is there a difference in what is served at each meal? Should we plan on having a big lunch or a big dinner, or will it even really matter? Before in Italy we mostly have had big lunches and modest suppers, but this is hard for him to adjust to.
Posts: 35 | Location: Alabama | Registered: 02 May 2006
We have never eaten more then one dish (and a salad)--when traveling in Italy--sometimes more with relatives. We never had a problem with it and never had to say anything if one was ordering from the primo and the other from the secondo section, which has happened a lot. They always brought them together. I remember many years ago, my sister-in-law had a problem getting them to serve the salad first, but this seems to have changed.
My relatives said they do not eat all these courses in their homes--they eat pretty much as we do.
As far as which should be your big meal--sometimes we had pasta twice a day and never had a problem eating --- we even lost weight with all the walking.
Posts: 344 | Location: Connecticut | Registered: 02 December 2005
When in Italy, I eat/order dinner exactly as I do here where I live and it is very similar to what Alice explained and I never had a problem. Not because I am in a different country, I am going to change my eating habits or my diet. I don't eat too much anyway. The only thing I hate is when people come to a restaurant for dinner and order a pizza... and take 2 hours to manage it with a fork and a knife and a glass of water... not even wine!!! Pizza for dinner...? No way!
Actually, in general pizza a pranzo in Italy is considered rather peculiar. Pizza al taglio as a light lunch or street snack sure. Pizzeria means dinner. In fact, generally pizzerie are closed during the day and are only open for dinner. Anytime you see a pizza anche a pranzo sign it really means stay away.
Anthony and Jennifer
Posts: 284 | Location: New Orleans | Registered: 01 July 2003
Topic Closed
I'm not a true vegetarian but eat far more veg than meat and indeed I remember lovely contorni in Umbria, and indeed it wasn't seen as rude to order more than one instead of a secondo.
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