Worst meal on recent trip: The tour-bus-captive restaurant outside Toledo Spain serves to hundreds of bussed-in tour passengers, who have no choice if they are on a full-day tour of Toledo, Escorial, Los Caidos. Doesn't matter which company, they all funnel their tourists to the same dang place. One gets to wait captive in a gew-gaw shop while the various busses are staged for the pleasure of standing in line for this drek -- Menu: Canned vegetable soup, microwaved rubber chicken with grit, microwaved spongy fries, canned fruit cocktail for dessert. Presumably the garnet-colored vinegar in a glass was supposed to be wine. All this and obligating roving musicians playing "Viva Madrid" ad nauseum. <BR> <BR>2. A PS re: yogurt. Personal preferences for yogurt or not aside, it's the best way to fend off intestinal reactions to local bacteria in water or whatever (or to counteract negative reactions to antibiotics). Eat some locally-produced yogurt (I personally love the thick, creamy, sweet stuff served around the Mediterranean that's a distant relation to the acidic custard we know) and it will help establish very helpful "intestinal flora" and avoid travellers' miseries.

Escaping a rain storm in the Black Forest town of Triberg I thought it would be a good time for a beer and a nice warm meal. <BR> <BR>I sat down ordered the beer and a Forelle (trout). Unfortunately when they brought the trout it was not cooked. So much for a warm meal ....

Worst meal? Simple. "Sheep head". July 1993, Athens. Split down the middle and grilled. <BR>

Thanks for the tips about food on Luftansa... My son is taking that airline this summer, so I'll be sure to pack him enough food to get him across the ocean!

Worst meal? I din't order it but i often saw it in ads and on menus when in Israel.....fried cow udders. Ugh! I can't even imagine loking at that much less eating it. As for Lufthansa airlines we flew them to Gemany earlier this year for the first time and we liked the airline and the food quite a lot. I got the kosher meal and it was by far the best kosher food I ever have gotten on an airline (guilt?). It was rather funny as when the first meal was served (and do they ever feed you meals often on Lufthansa. My Myron was in heaven with so many meals served on the flights) the stewardess came to me rather confused and helpless and asked me "may I please just give you one course at a time as the two course meals are so large?" and sure enough for each meal I got two large courses of the freshest most wonderful kosher food! Myron was so jealous and wished he had ordered kosher but he did really like the amount of food he got anyways. He is still telling people about how many meals, snacks, drinks etc they serve on overseas flights with Lufthansa. On the way back part of our flight was on United and he was so disappointed with the difference in food then. <BR>

Al, your post reminded me about my first morning staying with my boyfriend's sister in England. We were eating crumpets and her husband asked if I would like some marmate on my crumpet. I misheard and thought he said marmalade. Boy was that first bite a surprise! The stuff was wretched, but I managed to choke it down. I quickly declined seconds.

Kim, <BR> <BR>Please forgive my ignorance, but...what is a crumpet? And, what is marmate?

A few yrs. ago, a friend & I were in Hong Kong, and went to some recommended local restaurant ( quite posh). The specialty was drunken shrimp. They bring these live shrimp, sitting in a "fish bowl", and proceed to kill them on the spot by pouring some alcoholic beverage on them. After my friend finished shrieking, they concluded they'd better remove the shrimp, and finish the preparation in the kitchen. We never were able to eat them!

<BR>Diane - About the lutefisk! You were very wrong when you described it....It is not pickeled, not Swedish and not herring. :-) <BR>It is treated in lye, norwegian and cod. <BR>I am norwegian and I suppose I should love lutefisk, but I agree that it is awful. This is a very special dish, usually served around christmas. If you are going to eat a norwegian dish there is lot of other good seafood to choose from. <BR>I agree that the meals served at Lufthansa flights could be better, but it is not worse than Scandinavian Airlines which in my opinoin serves the worst airline food! <BR>Kaja

I think Beth's story of the kokoretsi has finally solved a mystery for me. My husband and I traveled across northern Greece by bus (what an incredible experience!) and overnighted in Ionnina (sp. probably way off). The restaurant we chose displayed the usual spits of lamb, pork (?) and the common, smaller, tight roll of something completely unidentifiable to us. We decided to venture on this unknown. One, or at the most, two bites later we discovered we had made an unedible mistake, so stuffed ourselves with $15 worth of french fries which seem to accompany every European meal. Fortunately. Later, while spending 5 nights on the island of Skopelos and making friends with the proprietor of one of the local restaurants, we asked him what that small roll on the spit was. He shook his head sadly and said, "I don't want to tell you." Never found out, thought it better not to pursue, but I'm sure Beth has finally enlightened us. Another time, not necessarily the worst, but most surprising meal was a pastrami sandwich in a London pub. It was ONE thin slice of pastrami between two slices of bread. I wondered what an Englishman would think if he ordered a pastrami sandwich here where you usually are lucky if you can get the thing in your mouth. The mustard on the sandwich was divine, however. LOVE THIS POST! <BR>

The worst food I ever ate actually occurred at one of the best meals I ever had! <BR>Sunday evening, Salisbury...whoda thunk that everything would be closed? My sister and I were famished, having had just a light meal (on the train, no less) from London to Salisbury. The prospect of travelling back to London and then eating left us daunted. As we got near the train station, we noticed lights on in the front of a store; it was several deli cases in the storefront with all sorts of grape-leafy things and ricey things. We were all set to buy some takeout, when we saw that there was a restaurant in the back. Turns out it's Turkish; we order a giant platter of "wunuvich" and some Turkish wine. I asked my sister "have you ever had Turkish food?" "nope, but the Turks have been around a lot longer than we have so how bad can it be?". The food was excellent; yummy little dolmothes, couscous, baklava-sort of things....a couple of kebobs. Well we finish everything except one kebob, and start to polish it off. We both did the same thing; two chews, napkin to the mouth, spit, hide it under the grape leaves. It was KIDNEY...nasty, nasty. And my sister will eat almost anything. Being of sound minds, we recognized it was us, not the food, and didn't let it spoil our meal or put us off from Turkish food. My sister has since eaten in Turkish restaurants in the U.S. and her first question is "no kidneys, RIGHT?"

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<BR>Although not in Europe... <BR> <BR>A dish of "clotted blood" served to me at a dim sum luncheon in New York City. I still have nightmares!

Kaja! Taks about the lutefisk! I think the Scandanavians in Nebraska (and North Dakota) probably intermarried a lot. So it was easy to confuse whether it was Swedish or Norwegian, tho my grandparents were all Swedes.

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Probably the worst meal we had was in Venice. I disrgarded the guidebooks advice and ate at a restaurant not sufficiantly gar enough from St. Marks Sq. It was a pizza/Italian Rest. The service was brusque and the pizza was awful. After that night we made sure that we went to the neighborhoods and had very good meals. We have been traveling to Europe about 12 yrs now and really can't recall a bad meal, except in England. Some of the countries we've visited have been poor and we've eaten cabbage soup with kielbosie in it for breakfast at a place in Slovakia for instance but Venice was worst.. Ordered a seafood meal in an Italian Restaurant in Slovenia by the Adriatic sea and was given the smallest calamari or octopuss' I ever seen doubt if one was more than an inch long, I though about it decided to try it because it was an authentic Italian restaurant and it turned out to be very good. alan

...yummy!

Although the worst meal I ever had was in Edinburgh and consisted of Haggis (a melange of minced sheep guts and oatmeal packed in stomach) and Black Pudding (intestines mixed with blood), my wife gets the prize for worst meal. On a business trip to Japan, she was served LIVE sushi--the meal was sliced and left on the flopping fish [she brought photos to prove it]. I think they ordered this for her to poke fun at the American, but she ate it and gained a lot of respect in their eyes [but was thecost worth it?].