Let's talk a little bit about the practical side of eating in Europe.
Here are some tips for how Europeans
do things a little bit differently than we do,
sort of the practicalities of European food experience.
The first thing that a lot of Americans get
a little confused by is the word "menu."
You may know that in a lot of countries in Europe,
if you go into a restaurant and you ask
for a menu they're not going to give you
the list of what you can order, they're
going to assume you want the fixed price
meal because in most countries in
Europe that's what a menu refers to.
If you want the bill of fare, if you want the
list of what you can order, that's usually
some word similar to "cart," so it's
la carta in Spain, it's la carte in France,
it’s Speisekarte in German.
So don't walk into a restaurant and
be confused if you ask for a menu and
they’re not quite sure what to make of it.
Speaking of those menus, however, these fixed price meals,
those can be a great way to get a nice survey of the local
cuisine, and often a good restaurant will have several levels
of their menu, so you can get a basic menu for one price.
If you want to get a little bit more
interesting, and have a little higher
quality ingredients, you can actually
go up a little bit in quality.
The other thing to be aware of in different European countries, is
that the way that Europeans organize
their meals can be different.
The way that they lay out the order of courses can be different.
As an example, let me talk about an Italian meal.
A traditional big Italian meal actually involves four
different courses, you have the antipasti or the appetizers.
That would be something like marinated vegetables.
Then you have the primi, the primi piatto, the
first course, that's usually a pasta or a soup, then you
have the secondi, or the secondo, that's a main course,
usually, meat or fish, and the final course is dessert.
This sounds like a pretty rigid structure, but
honestly, most Italians don't eat every course.
You look at this and say, “Jeez, do I have to order all four courses?”
Not necessarily.
I had an Italian friend, I said, “How many courses is it polite to order?
I don't want to feel like I'm cheaping out.”
And they said, “Well, really, as long
as you order two courses per person,
that's fine, and sharing is usually okay.”
If I'm in an Italian restaurant
with my wife, we might order two pastas
and a main course and a dessert,
so that's two courses per person, four
courses total, and that's just fine.
By the way, Italian chefs are fanatic about your digestion.
This is something else that's a little different than the way
we think about food, but European chefs, especially in Italy,
really lose sleep over your digestion and making sure that
there's a proper progression for the different courses of food.
Here's an example.
Very traditionally, if you order a big meal, including a salad, the
salad is going to come after the pasta at a traditional restaurant.
At a touristy restaurant, they know you're an American, so they'll
probably bring it out at the beginning, or they'll ask you.
If you go to a very traditional restaurant, they assume
you want the pasta first, then the salad because
it creates a nice little buffer in your stomach, between
the pasta and the meat that you're about to eat.
I once went to a very traditional restaurant
in Florence and I ordered a salad
and a pasta and the pasta came and I
thought, “Well, I guess they forgot about the salad.”
Then after the pasta, here comes the salad, and I didn't have
another course coming, but that was
just the order that they did things in.
Be aware, it's not because they're being
stubborn, it's not because they're trying
to confuse you, it's simply that they believe
that's the proper way to ingest food.
There is a proper order to these things.
There's a proper water to drink with different kinds of food.
You don't want mineral water for every food,
or you don't want bubbles for every food.
Just be aware of that.
In general, European chefs frown on substitutions.
This is I think, a big cultural difference with the United States.
I think in a lot of cases, Americans go to a
restaurant and we assume the customer is always right.
"I know what food I want. I know how I want it."
Europeans go to a restaurant and
say, "No, I'm putting myself in the hands of an expert.
The chef knows the right way to make the food."
If you go to an American restaurant and say, “Can
I have the side from this meal with the main from this meal?”
They'll say, “Sure, I'll ask the chef, I'm sure it's fine.”
Europeans, they might actually kick you out for asking that question.
The chef designed everything together for a reason.
That's the way it's supposed to be, so it requires an attitude
adjustment sometimes to understand where they're coming from.
I mentioned earlier about sharing courses in an Italian restaurant.
Rick Steves, personally and all of us here, we're
big fans of sharing courses family style.
Sharing food is a great way to get lots
of different samples of different dishes.
There are cultures where it works really well.
For example, in Greece and Turkey, they have a
mezedes way of eating where the assumption is
that you're going to go and order a bunch of
little dishes and everyone's going to share.
Even in countries where that's a little
less common, usually they're very
forgiving of Americans who say, "Can we
order a couple of dishes and split them?"
In Italy, if you know a magic word that might actually give you
two different pastas on one plate, the magic word is bis, B-I-S.
A lot of restaurants will let you order pasta bis,
meaning, "I want half a plate of this pasta and half a
plate of this pasta," and they understand that you
want to mix and match and try some different things.
Don't be intimidated by European menus.
Honestly, some of the better places have menus that
are only in one language, which can be intimidating,
but oftentimes the server speaks a little English and
they're happy to help you sort through your choices.
It's worth investing in a menu decoder.
We have a series of Rick Steves guidebooks for several different
languages and the biggest part of our phrasebook is the menu decoder.
I actually, literally, did the research for this where I went over
to Europe and I walked from restaurant to restaurant for several
days and I wrote down everything I saw in menus to make sure that
we had all the words that are actually appearing on European menus.
That can really help avoid some of the confusion that you might have.
There's also a lot of great online translating apps.
I have the Google Translate app, which works great.
It's a little less focused on menu decoding, but it can
certainly help you figure out what the basic ingredients are.
My last tip though about a menu decoding and languages,
the language barrier when it comes to eating, is
don't let yourself be intimidated just because you
don't know every single thing that's in that dish.
Usually, my goal is to figure out what the main ingredient is.
There's maybe one or two things that I want
to get a sense, is this a fish, is it a meat?
What am I roughly expecting?
At a certain point, you should take a leap of faith.
I would say don't go into restaurants expecting
to understand every aspect of every dish.
I want to talk a little bit about service in European restaurants.
If you've been to Europe, you know that the way that Europeans expect
to be served in restaurants is a little different than it is here.
For one thing, a European service is very relaxed.
It's slow to an American's standard and the reason
for that is, again, it's a philosophical adjustment.
When Europeans go to a restaurant, dinner for a
lot of people is the evening's entertainment.
They're not trying to get a quick meal in
before they go to the movies or go out dancing.
They're there to really enjoy that restaurant.
Actually, rushed service is rude service to Europeans.
If you're ever in a restaurant and you have
to basically stand up and wave your hand to
get your waiter to come over to you, you
might think, "Boy, this guy is ignoring me. I don't understand why."
Well, the understanding why is that, for Europeans,
it would be rude if he kept coming over
to you because you might feel rushed.
As you probably know, if you've been to Europe, you
will never get the bill until you asked for the bill.
I have to say this is really hard for Americans
because you're done, you're ready to go,
you've got places to be, and now you have to
flag down the person to bring you your bill.
Honestly, after I'd been in Europe for a few weeks and
I come home and I'm in an American restaurant and
I'm finishing the last bite of my food and I see the
bill land on the table, I'm a little bit offended.
"Are you trying to get rid of me?"
[laughter]
That's how Europeans think about this,
so just be relaxed, be ready to spend a
little extra time at restaurants, and don't
think that slow service is bad service.
The other thing I want to talk about is tipping.
Europeans, in general, are less generous tippers
than Americans are, and it's really okay.
I know that I'm not going to convince you all to start tipping
10%, but I'm here to tell you, Europeans usually tip 10% or less.
It really is the case.
I think in America we have this understanding
that people usually get a minimum
wage or lower for their base salary and
most of their salary comes from tips.
In European culture, it's a little bit different.
Tipping is considered really optional.
The person that's waiting on you actually receives
a very healthy salary and the tip is really just a bonus.
Most Europeans would round up the bill 5% or 10%.
It's really just a convenience so that the server
doesn't have to fish around for loose change.
That's philosophically what tipping is.
Honestly, a lot of countries, a lot of Europeans don't tip at all.
I know that's hard for Americans.
I usually tip somewhere between 5% and 10%.
I figure out what would 10% be and then I maybe round it down
a little bit to the nearest round number and that's plenty.
It's just a very different philosophy than it is here.