Restaurant reviews by Justin Tanner, our retired food critic, who’d be watching more of Masterchef if they’d left in the bits where Gregg grabs the contestants’ arses.
I’M off on holiday. It’s been a while and a mate down the pub told me Sorrento is pretty upmarket. As a discerning chap, I wanted my first time in Eyetie Land to be classy.
Only it’s apparent upon arrival that it’s only ‘upmarket’ if your usual holiday abroad begins with a flight to bloody Alicante. A brief amble around the tourist shops is enough to conclude I’m in Italy’s equivalent of Blackpool.
Plastic Virgin Marys seem to be a local obsession. They’re on sale everywhere, though God only knows who’s buying this shit. And ashtrays with paintings of lemons on. They’re obsessed with lemons too. Acting like they invented the bloody things, which is typical of your Italian. Taking the credit for doing nothing, like they did in the war.
But worst of all, endless bags of cock-and-balls-shaped tricolour pasta. Why would I want to eat that? Do I look like a poofter?
But it’s the local food scene I’m really interested in. I’m well-versed in global cuisine so I know that Italians practically live on pizzas and spag bol. Much like myself, so in theory I should be in spaghetti Nirvana.
Sadly breakfast does nothing to reassure me I’m in the foodie heaven I was expecting. The usual, uneducated foreigners’ stab at a full English is predictably inedible. I’m glad I had the foresight to bring a bottle of HP sauce with me, so I surreptitiously smother everything in that for an all-pervading taste of molasses and vinegar. I’m no fool.
There’s flyers in the hotel foyer advertising trips to Pompeii, which I’ll be giving a miss. I don’t need to travel halfway around Europe to view a decimated city steeped in tales of horror. I live in Birmingham.
Lunchtime rolls around, so I opt for a ‘classic’ Italian salad of tomato, mozzarella and basil. Only that’s all there is to it. A sliced tomato, lump of cheese that I now know tastes of nothing unless it’s cooked atop a pizza and some cursory leaves. For nine bloody Euros?
I spend the afternoon supping piss-thin Italian lager by the pool and hoping dinner will be an improvement. I head to a ristorante away from the main square, where you can’t even get a bowl of chips without needing a second mortgage.
When in Rome, as they say, so I ask the waiter for spaghetti bolognese. He rather snootily informs me that’s not a real dish here. So those ready meals in Aldi are holograms, are they? Apparently, locals here call bolognese sauce ‘ragu’ and it’s only eaten with tagliatelle, never spaghetti. Like I can tell the sodding difference.
Pizza it is then and, unsurprisingly, they don’t have pepperoni, tandoori chicken or jalapeno toppings like proper pizzas from Domino’s, so salami it is. It’s passable, but not a patch on the real thing.
As I wend my way back to my hotel, again running the gauntlet of penis pasta, plastic virgins and endless lemon-themed tat, I muse on why anyone would think this moped-fumed, tacky as f**k hellhole that doesn’t even have a beach is the height of sophistication.
My inevitable conclusion is that my standards in global travel are considerably higher that those of the common herd. Like I didn’t know that already.
