Eating like an Italian is about more than food—it’s about pace, simplicity and enjoyment. Here’s how to follow the unwritten rules and experience Italy’s food culture like a local.
It’s easy to romanticize the Italian relationship with food. But for North Americans, a bit of adjustment is required to truly make the most of eating in Italy. But here’s the good news: It’s worth it. Because for your efforts, you won’t just get to try new foods, you’ll also learn to eat—and live—like an Italian, giving you a sense of what it feels like to embody la dolce vita.
I sat down with Backroads’ amazing Italy team for tips that will help any North American understand what’s actually happening when you sit down to the table in a restaurant in Italy. Spoiler: It’s not always what you’d expect.
Less Is More
Ask an Italian the maximum number of ingredients a dish should have and they’ll likely say no more than five, including olive oil and salt. In traditional Italian cuisine, less is more. As a country that was poor for much of its history, dishes that required a long list of ingredients weren’t accessible to most. This simplicity has a secondary benefit too: Uncomplicated preparations let individual ingredients like tomatoes and olive oil really shine.
You’ll see the keep-it-simple concept in action all over the country. Order a salad and you’ll likely get a plate of lettuce and small cruets of olive oil and vinegar for you to dress your salad simply and to your taste. And panini tend to have just a few key ingredients rather than a more typically American kitchen-sink approach to the perfect sandwich.
The Pacing of Italian Restaurant Meals
If what you want out of a meal is to sit, eat and go, you might find the pace of restaurants in Italy challenging. That’s because here, restaurants are places where people gather to celebrate life, family and friends, and celebrations shouldn’t be rushed.
In Italy, meals at home typically consist of two courses. To elevate the dining experience, restaurants often expand meals to three, four, or even five courses. Often before dinner there’s an aperitivo, a drink paired with a little snack like olives or nuts. After sitting, the meal often begins with antipasto, an appetizer that’s often something like charcuterie or bruschetta. Then we get into the first of the two main dishes. Primi dishes tend to be either a starch like pasta or risotto, or a soup. Traditionally, primi are a filling dish that helps people feel satiated before getting to the secondi, which usually feature historically more expensive ingredients like meat or fish. Other courses like salad or a cheese and fruit course sometimes sneak in, but meals end with dolce, the dessert course and an espresso (totally appropriate to order a decaf, called caffè decaffeinato or simply un deca) or digestivo like grappa or limoncello, which is said to aid digestion.
Often, the kitchen won’t start making the next course until you have finished the preceding course and it’s been cleared. In Italy, kitchens are not built for speed. Many restaurants still maintain a culture of seatings, where diners enter at about the same time (8 p.m., for example) and the kitchen then makes the same course for everyone at once. Which works in a culture where no one is there to speed through a meal but gets a little tricky if your natural pacing is faster, you’ve had a big day and you’re jet-lagged.
Four courses can seem overwhelming, especially if you’re doing it night after night. So here’s your pep talk: It’s totally acceptable to not finish everything on your plate. In fact, one Italian I spoke with suggested it might actually be seen as a sign the kitchen is doing its job and they’ve fed you enough. Another thing to note is that portions tend to be smaller than what you’ll find at most restaurants in the US and Canada.
Dairy Rules
In the US, dairy rules. But in Italy, there are dairy rules. Maybe it’s the fact that Italy has never been a big cow country or that olive oil is the undisputed fat of choice. Whatever it is, milk products are used sparingly compared to many other European countries. And when milk, butter and cheese are used, there are a surprising number of cultural protocols.
- Butter: In the Alps, where cows are more a part of the landscape, you’ll see butter used, but as soon as you leave the high-elevation north, you’ll notice a quick transition to olive oil for pretty much everything except baking.
- Milk: Milk, meanwhile, is generally thought of as breakfast food and given to children with cookies (for dipping) or cereal before school. When it comes to coffee, milk in the form of a cappuccino is acceptable before noon. But after lunch, espresso is the drink of choice. If you really need a little dairy hit, order a macchiato—an espresso with a modest dollop of hot or cold milk on top.
- Cheese: Italians also generally don’t pair fish with dairy. If you order pasta with fish or shellfish, for instance, it wouldn’t be topped with parmesan. There are some exceptions though, including pizza topped with anchovies and dishes that pair salted and cured bottarga with a cheese such as ricotta.
Coffee
There’s so much to say about how to drink coffee like an Italian that we just went ahead and wrote a whole separate blog post about it! A quick summary: filter coffee is hard to find, espresso reigns, and if you want to do as the Italians do, don’t order a cappuccino after noon.
Asking for the Check
Unlike in North America where the waitstaff delivers the check at the close of the meal, in Italy, it’s up to you to ask for the check. This is not an accident or an oversight or you being ignored: this is tied to a deep respect for your experience. In Italy, it’s not someone else’s decision when the meal is over, it’s your meal and your time. To pay, you can either ask for the check or, depending on the restaurant, you may just go to the cassa (cashier) to pay.
Why trust me: I’m a food-obsessed professional traveler who spends more than a month in Italy every year (visiting family that live among olive orchards in Tuscany). For this story, I recruited Backroads’ amazing Italy team to help me decode for our guests some of the biggest stumbling blocks they see among visitors from North America.
