Planning Restaurants

So I've been MIA for so long, no one probably even reads this anymore. But that's okay, I'm doing this more for myself than anyone anyway, because it's fun! :) A job, a long weekend to a tennis tournament, and some misplaced priorities resulted in this blog getting pushed to the back burner, but that's done now. For me, writing about travel is really cathartic, it helps me dream and plan and hope for more interesting adventures, so I will really try my best to update more regularly than I have been lately (Certainly more than once a month!!!!!).

without further ado....

While I was planning my trip, something I grappled with was how far to take my planning. It was important for me to at least make rudimentary plans for what I'd be doing each day, if for no other reason than to make sure the sights I planned on a particular day made solid geographic sense and so that I wasn't planning day trips the days right before and after traveling between cities (to break up the train trips).

But one of the things I encountered on many travel message boards throughout my research was how much of the finer details to plan. Some people, I've noticed, make all their restaurant reservations before they left home! To me that seemed too much; it takes all the remaining spontaneity out of it, and for me, exploring and finding places to eat along the way and off the beaten are part of the fun of being on vacation. Plus, by limiting yourself to places that take reservations, you miss out on some of the best places - the little places you can't even find online, the dives, the locals-only places that are so good that you have to wait an hour to get in or go early, no matter what.

But on the other hand, all of the places I did write down beforehand turned out to be excellent; from the TER Steakhouse in Amsterdam to Purstner in Vienna to Florence's lovely Osteria del Cinghiale Bianco to the beloved Da Francesco's in Rome, these are places where I had wonderful - even memorable - meals, that I I never would have found but for the amazing suggestions of locals and more experienced travelers. Moreover, with the level of tourist traps that exist in a lot of the world's most attractive cities, it's nice to have a fall-back list of places given by locals and experienced travelers that, in a bind, you know you can try out in an effort to avoid the obvious traps where the food is as bad as the prices are high. And at the end of the day, I'd much rather over-plan than get stuck at a bad restaurant on vacation, especially in a place that has a great cuisine and great restaurants that has unfortunately succumbed to the tourist hordes.

I suppose it comes down to a couple of things. For me, trying certain foods in each city was important. In Italy, I really wanted to try good pizza and gelato, in Amsterdam I wanted to try a really good Argentine steakhouse, etc. So in the end, relying solely on spontaneity would have only hurt myself because I would probably have missed out on these and other jewels. But relying solely on advance planning would be the other extreme; i would have missed out on the spontaneity of finding my own jewels and gems, several of which I did find.

Like most things in travelling and planning, there in no right answer to this issue; we all have to decide and do what will make us happy. But I do think that if you are a foodie, you would be doing yourself a disservice to not travel somewhere without at least a couple of special and authentic places that will satisfy your culinary goals.