Let’s be clear. I love love love taking pictures and experiencing different cultures but trumping that would be my love of stuffing my face. To know me is to know that I love food. I’m not a “foodie”, please, that’s amateur talk. What I am is a cook. I’m not trained, my knife skills are subpar, no stitches yet amazingly, and I can’t even bake a boxed cake right. But I can cook, and know what I’m even better at than cooking? Eating. So it should be no surprise that I started looking at restaurants about 3 months before our trip. My Pinterest restaurant list is strong friends. At any moment I’d be ready, no matter which city our not so laid back, laid back road trip took us to. And, not trying to make you jealous here-but my mother in law can put a fine dining chef to shame with her skills, so I came ready to eat. Stretchy pants were packed and at the ready. Most of my pre-trip conversations with the hubs went a little something like this:
Me: I really feel like last year I didn’t eat enough gelato.
Hubs: then you should eat more gelato.
Me: like, I can have that daily, right? Oooh, the panne cotta at Il Bruco!! I have to make sure I get some of that. Do you think your mom made sauce? Will she make sauce? Meat sauce and marinara? How much bread do you think I can eat? Loaf daily probably…and don’t even get me going on the amount of cheese I’m going to put away. Hard, soft, semi-soft, goat, sheep, cow-bring it don’t sing it, it’s on.
Hubs: yeah, we’ve met
I happen to proudly be one of those annoying people who takes pictures of their food and posts it on social media. I’ll do it til I die, it’s just who I am. You don’t have to look at it, but you know you want to because it’s fecking delicious. Sometimes I cook whole meals just so I can make it look fantastic on a plate so I can take a pic of it. It’s like art to me…no…food is like a religion to me. So it should come as no surprise that I shot everything we ate and now I’m going to show it to you and tell you all about. Mangia y’all.
Eating in Switzerland
I swear to Buddha, I expected to see far more fondue options on Swiss menus. I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but do you remember in the 80’s when fondue was a thing? Well, my parents were into it…I mean, like into it, so I just assumed it was a prevalent menu item. I was wrong, but who cares because the food was amazing! And I didn’t fall behind on my daily intake of cheese or chocolate not one time. Like, the food was so good that I’m already thinking about what I’ll be eating the next time we go and we haven’t even been back a week.
Eating in Interlaken
For lunch, after checking into our adorable hotel that we almost got divorced over, but I digress, we walked to a cafe in town. The hubs had a local beer and I a spritz along with some of the crustiest and perfectly textured bread, some fresh ass cheese and great produce. Just enough to get me ready for the main event, dinner.
Dinner at Hotel Beausite
I don’t know about y’all, but some of the best food I’ve ever had came from small kitchens of little hotels and simple places. We ate outside in this charming courtyard. Now, as a southern gal, I heart me some scattered, covered fromWaffle House, so you can imagine my surprise and delight when I read that there was rösti on the menu-yep, I’ll be getting some of that. Rösti is basically the Swiss version of scattered smothered and covered hash browns from Waffle House. Amazing, life changing even. There may have been some butter in this dish. It was fecking delicious. It’s a perfect example of how simple ingredients make the best foods… you don’t need fancy foams or weird gimmicks. The cheese freshly made, the bacon crisp, the tomatoes picked that day…did I mentioned this was smothered in cheese? So good, so good. For desert our lovely server, Jon, recommended some double chocolate mousse and folks, Jon knows what he’s doing here.
Eating in Italy, I mean heaven, no, it’s Italy.
When we arrived in Fiumalbo, fresh off the panic attack inducing Audostrada, there was not one chance in hell I was getting back in a car to go anywhere. Luckily my MIL knows us well and had a spread to feed an army. There were tears, cheese,wine, pasta, prosciutto, some more cheese, bread, some more tears, the best damn tomato I’ve ever had, some more wine, and this was just in the first half hour.
Things you might not know about eating in an Italian home: now I can’t speak for all Italian homes, but I can speak to the one I belong to…
1. To be Italian is to have a red checkered table cloth. And you best get to shaking that thing out outside after eating.
2. To be Italian is to bring you fresh veg or bread or eggs or whatever else the hell you produce, grow, make, etc. my FIL has a friend with a lovely garden and when he heard that I was coming and love tomatoes he basically gave Pop a whole harvest including but not limited to a tomato the size of my head, and that’s saying something because I have a giant head. I was afraid of it, it was so big! How do you even cut that thing up? The cherry tomatoes so sweet I was stuffing them in my cheeks like a chipmunk.
3. To be Italian is to make sauce. My MIL had gallons ready upon our arrival. Every thirty seconds she’s like, pasta asciutta? Yes. Yes. All the time, always, I want you to fill the bathtub with it and let me soak in it.
4. To be Italian is to know that wine doesn’t actually count as a drink and pizza doesn’t really count as a meal. Both things I’m completely on board with.
Fiumalbo may be small, but you don’t need to be big for great restaurants
I’m not a big city girl. I don’t really like them and I also know, because I live in a tourist city, that food costs more in the city, but that doesn’t mean that it’s better in the city. It’s actually better in the countryside, like most things. Casablanca and Il Bruco are two favs in Fiumalbo…
Let’s talk about capers for a minute. I don’t know how you feel about them, but I’m full on Team Caper. I will put them on everything. However, it had never occurred to me to eat them on pizza until I saw Pop order it and my mind was blown. Casablanca serves up a mean pizza with capers and this lovely desert soaked in liquor-just the way I like it.
Double date night, Italian style
I think I’ve said this before, but when you travel as a couple, you rarely get photos together that aren’t selfies.
So, when given the opportunity to have a double date night with Daria and Pop, which also includes truffled potatoes, well, you don’t have to ask me twice. Off to Il Bruco we go.
Grilled pumpkin and veal and fried polenta and truffles and peppercorns and zucchini and chocolate and food coma oh my. Il Bruco is so yummy that we went back for lunch and the chef let us know that he went to school with JJ’s aunt and we loved the wine so much, they let us buy a bottle to take home. I’m starting to get this whole la dolce vita stuff.
Il Bruco round two:
We took a road trip up to the village Pop was born in for lunch one day. This is the kinda place you’ve read about in cooking magazines or seen on Food Network. Michelin rated and top notch. We ate ourselves silly in Cutigliano.
I had this dish that was very thinly sliced beef cooked on plate with oil, garlic and rosemary and topped with fresh Gorgonzola which is slid into a wood burning oven served still cooking and then I shoved it all in my face. You could have just put me at the top of the hill and I could have rolled home I ate so much. It was perfect.
After cleaning out northern Italy’s pantry, back over the alps to Switzerland we go where we continued to eat copious amounts of deliciousness.
In Brissago we strolled down the promenade and stopped at a lovely cafe where some German tourist made fun of me because I’m a dumb American who had the audacity to ask the server a question about the wine. They were sitting next to us, and they laughed at me for what felt like 30 minutes. I would have been upset about it, but we where in fecking Brissago so you’re gonna have to try a lot harder than that to ruin my good time.
In Grindelwald we had one of those meals that you will still talk about 5 years from now. First off, we stayed in a very special place. Hotel Glacier was a happy accident as the hubs accidentally booked a room not in Interlaken but in a town near by. He was originally worried about it as he was unsure how close to town we would be…all of that melted away when we arrived.
Greeted with spritzes and chocolates, the view from the lobby breathtaking, and from our room, even better.
I’m officially smitten and we haven’t even eaten dinner yet!! The service and quality of this joint is fantastic and the hubs and I can’t believe our luck. Or is every place in this special country amazing and we aren’t lucky at all…either way, dinner is about to be served.
Seriously, one of the best meals that has every passed through this chubbaroo’s lips. Simply perfect. The pork belly, the truffled cheese, the cucumber soup and the beef filet cooked perfectly, it was so damn good we couldn’t even order desert…and that’s saying something with us.
Did I mention that we hiked and walked enough to not gain a single lb on vacay? Well, it’s true, the hubs even shed a few pounds. I like to think that driving in Italy burned all my calories but more on that later.
Even at the end of our trip, literally at a hotel inside the airport, I had one of the freshest burratas I’ve ever had and a delightful little one last scoop of gelato before crossing the pond.
A perfect way to say goodbye to this culinary adventure.
Life in Italy, and Switzerland is truly delicious. Ciao y’all.
Ciao Y’all 