To Live and Let Dine
May. 30th, 2025 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerItaly Travelog #23
Chia, Sardinia - Thursday, 29 May 2025, 8pm
Eating dinner surprising takes a lot of planning in Italy. Especially as an American with American habits. Restaurants virtually all close after lunch and don't open again until dinner. And dinner is late. A few restaurants start at 7pm. Many don't reopen for dinner until 7:30. And you often need reservations. Especially for dinner, as most casual restaurants, the kind where reservations aren't required, don't even serve dinner. They close after lunch. So if you want dinner out, you've got to plan ahead and wait.
It's extra hard out here in Chia on the island of Sardinia where there aren't even that many restaurants. Other than the few onsite at the hotel, which are all expensive and have tiny menus— each has, like, one thing Hawk could eat— there's one other restaurant nearby. It's spendy and also has, like, one thing Hawk could eat. After that the next nearest place is a taxi ride away. Except there are no taxis here. And a private car costs €45. Each way. Even just to go a few miles.
We ended up buying a few things at the small grocery store a few minutes' walk from the resort and enjoying a picnic dinner on our patio. Oh, but we had to go quickly, because the grocery closes at 7pm.
The photo shows the two kinds of sliced meat I bought, sliced cheese, bread, and wine. The cheese is pecorino sardo, a local style of pecorino. The bread is focaccia. And the wine is Cannonau, a locally grown grape that is actually an ancient clone of Grenache/Garnacha. Most of it was pretty tasty. One of the two types of meat was overly dry.
On our way out to the store, when we were discussing the limited dining-out options with the hotel concierge, I remarked that waiting until 7:30 for restaurant seating was unusual to me because most Americans eat dinner earlier. She explained that Italians normally eat dinner as late as 9:30. To them, she explained, 7:30 dinner is early because people who work in stores only close up at 7. They have to go home and start dinner or go back out to eat.
It's an interesting explanation that points to a cultural difference. In the US we think of the service industry as there to serve us. In Italy it's more recognized that the service industry is "us"; that it's normal people working jobs in retail, and they need to live their lives, too.
Chia, Sardinia - Thursday, 29 May 2025, 8pm
Eating dinner surprising takes a lot of planning in Italy. Especially as an American with American habits. Restaurants virtually all close after lunch and don't open again until dinner. And dinner is late. A few restaurants start at 7pm. Many don't reopen for dinner until 7:30. And you often need reservations. Especially for dinner, as most casual restaurants, the kind where reservations aren't required, don't even serve dinner. They close after lunch. So if you want dinner out, you've got to plan ahead and wait.
It's extra hard out here in Chia on the island of Sardinia where there aren't even that many restaurants. Other than the few onsite at the hotel, which are all expensive and have tiny menus— each has, like, one thing Hawk could eat— there's one other restaurant nearby. It's spendy and also has, like, one thing Hawk could eat. After that the next nearest place is a taxi ride away. Except there are no taxis here. And a private car costs €45. Each way. Even just to go a few miles.
We ended up buying a few things at the small grocery store a few minutes' walk from the resort and enjoying a picnic dinner on our patio. Oh, but we had to go quickly, because the grocery closes at 7pm.
The photo shows the two kinds of sliced meat I bought, sliced cheese, bread, and wine. The cheese is pecorino sardo, a local style of pecorino. The bread is focaccia. And the wine is Cannonau, a locally grown grape that is actually an ancient clone of Grenache/Garnacha. Most of it was pretty tasty. One of the two types of meat was overly dry.
On our way out to the store, when we were discussing the limited dining-out options with the hotel concierge, I remarked that waiting until 7:30 for restaurant seating was unusual to me because most Americans eat dinner earlier. She explained that Italians normally eat dinner as late as 9:30. To them, she explained, 7:30 dinner is early because people who work in stores only close up at 7. They have to go home and start dinner or go back out to eat.
It's an interesting explanation that points to a cultural difference. In the US we think of the service industry as there to serve us. In Italy it's more recognized that the service industry is "us"; that it's normal people working jobs in retail, and they need to live their lives, too.
