Foreign Food (a.k.a Doing Things Right)
We decided to go out for Italian food last night. But we’re not the kind of people to do things half-assed. Sure, there’s a good Italian restaurant right down the street from us. There’s a slightly better one about 5 miles away.
So then we start thinking about taking a 3 hour drive to New York City to go to Little Italy and really do Italian food right. It’s a little too cold to eat at one of the ones with a great little courtyard that makes it feel like you’re not anywhere near Manhattan, but there’d still be plenty of authentic Italian food.
But, like I said, we don’t like to do things half-assed. We realized that the only way to do Italian food really right was to grab a quick flight across the Atlantic and have dinner in Italy.
Our first reaction was probably a lot like your’s. “That’s crazy.” “Italy’s far away.” “We won’t get there until well after dinner time anyway.” “That’s too expensive just for dinner.”
That’s all crazy talk.
If you’re going to do something right, go and do it right.
The flights are only about 11 hours. Around $4200 for two people. We could get there by around 3:00 pm local time, and with those crazy European dinner times, that turned out to be just about right.
Well worth it. I don’t care what you say, the place down the street doesn’t do Italian food nearly as well as the place a few miles outside of Milan. Was it $4200 and half a day of travel time better? I guess that all depends on how important you think it is to do something right. For people like me who don’t like to settle for “close enough”, it’s very much worth it.
Although it does mean that I don’t get to eat Chinese food very often.
I wonder if I could legally declare my garage to be part of China, and therefore I’d be able to make authentic Chinese food in there. I could build a mini great wall around the garage, put a mini great firewall on the garage’s Internet connection. Maybe find a miniature panda or two to keep in the corner.
I like it. Anyone know who I need to call to get my garage declared part of China? Can the Chinese government do it on their own, or does the American government need to give permission for that little piece of land to secede? Does the American government really get that much say over a piece of land that I own?
Man, there are a lot of questions here. But it’ll be well worth it to have Chinese food done right. None of this imitation stuff for us, soon.
Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!