Today was my wife’s last day off before returning to work after the Christmas/New Year break. We decided to have a special lunch out, and we walked with Scully down to Blues Point, where there’s a small area of a few shops and restaurants on the main street running down to the harbour. It’s a little over a half hour’s walk away, but we go there sometimes and have tried an Indian and a Spanish restaurant there.
We wanted to try what I thought was an Italian place, but it turned out to be more generically “Mediterranean”, meaning a mixture of Greek and Italian food.* It turned out to be a little rustic – the sort of restaurant that’s probably been there unchanged for 30 or 40 years. The building looked like it hadn’t been renovated in that long, and the menus were simple folded thin cardboard sheets that looked like they’d been handled by thousands of people, with the edges worn and the ink fading.
We had some pita bread with dips (hummus, tzatziki, and taramasalata), and I had fettuccine with prawns and chorizo, while my wife had the haloumi and watermelon salad. The dips were very generous and the pasta was delicious. It was all really good.
We walked a longer way home by a different route for variety, and to tire Scully out for the afternoon. We made it home not long before the overcast turned to rain and thunderstorms. This is a cool change that’s forecast to turn our 28°C days into 23-25°C for the next few days. Pretty chilly for the middle of summer.
* It’s an interesting thing that “Mediterranean” food means different things in different countries. Here in Australia, if you say “Mediterranean food” people will assume you mean Greek/Italian. Whereas I noticed when visiting England a few years ago that all the restaurants that advertised “Mediterranean” food were serving what we would call Middle Eastern food – Turkish/Lebanese dishes.
New content today:
I think in the US, we would classify Mediterranean and Middle Eastern the same way you did.
I’m American, and I think of Mediterranean as Greek and Italian, in addition to French. But that’s one man’s opinion.