Our whole program took a weekend trip from our homebase of Florence to Turin. After our 4 hours of traveling, my group of six had about an hour to find food before we had to meet up with the rest of the group for a tour of the Lavazza museum in the evening. Italian meals tend to last an hour at the absolute least, so we needed to get seated as soon as possible. Momentarily, we looked to Yelp for guidance, but in our rush, we chose the only restaurant in our line of sight, a minute away from the hotel. It’s embarrassing to me to ambush quaint restaurants like this with our large group, but the Italian servers are always accommodating, often merging multiple tables just for us. We sat, and then the menu glared up at our American eyes:

Many restaurants have menus with English translations, but this time, we were not so lucky. Furthermore, this menu was handwritten. The menu probably changes frequently at the restaurant, which boded well for its quality, but unfortunately, the google-translate-photo-function was rendered useless. The kind server obliged when we asked her to tell us about the menu in English. We all hang on her every word as she rattles off ephemeral descriptions of eggplant…squid…bruschetta? We settled on two tomato burrata salads for the table and a bowl of ragu for each of us.

Salads like this are commonplace in Italy, but this one was so subtly elevated. It’s tomato season in Italy, is what I’ve been told over and over, but this was the first time I could appreciate that fact. They were sweet with a depth of flavor that suggested they were ripe picked earlier today. The burrata balances them with its salty, creamy flow. This salad did not demand balsamic, but we splashed some on anyway.

Italian restaurants frequently surprise me with how fast the food comes out. Just as we finished our salad, our next course appeared. It was such a simple dish, the best meals are. Just like the humble burrata salad, the ingredients were few but chosen and prepared with great care. The sauce coated every cranny of the large starchy spirals and tender beef mingled among the crevices. Silence blanketed the table as we savored.

Italy has no shortage of amazing food. Time and time again, I stop at whatever restaurant I find along my way – no Google search or Yelp page required – and I am blown away by the quality. This began because of the number of restaurants everywhere. I knew that anything that yelp recommended was likely to be full of too many people to have a pleasant time. This is also because many Italian restaurants don’t show up on Yelp, or even Google. Even if they do, it’s probable that, unless there’s lots of English content, it wouldn’t do me much good.