Look At The Plates

When travelling, there’s a long list of advice people give about how to find a good place to eat:

• Eat where the locals eat

• Avoid menus with photos

• Look for short menus

• Check Google & Trip Advisor reviews

• Avoid restaurants with someone trying to pull you inside

All of that can be useful. But there’s another signal that’s quieter and surprisingly reliable.

Look at the plates.

A hallmark of quality - flowery plates. Koh Kood, Thailand.

If the plates are old, patterned and slightly mismatched, you’re usually in the right place.

Not modern white restaurant plates - this can be a red herring. Not colourful crockery. Not uniform stoneware chosen by an interior designer. The good places often have plates that look like they’ve been there forever.

Floral prints. Gold rims slightly faded. Different patterns mixed together. The sort of plates that feel like they might have come from someone’s grandmother’s cupboard.

Veronese bollito misto - Locanda Castelvecchio

And that usually means something important. It means the restaurant probably wasn’t designed first and cooked in second. It grew slowly and. It’s probably been serving food long enough that the plates have simply accumulated over time.

Places like this tend to prioritise; home cooking, regular customers, continuity. They don’t generally do it as a concept, branding, or pure aesthetic.

Bowls of goodness in good bowls, Kuala Lumpur

Of course, pre-planning for this is not always possible. Sometimes you only notice the crockery when the food arrives and the plate lands on the table. And when that moment does come, it often brings a quiet feeling of relief. You sit back comfortably in the chair and think, “Ah. This is going to be good.”

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Fruit, Heat, Repeat

It’s hot and humid and we are stood uneasily inside a badly lit shop. Sharp knives are carelessly left on any flat surface that can be found. A large spider crawls up a wooden beam directly behind my wife and settles, part-camouflaged beneath a heap of pineapples. There’s a bucket of discarded leaves, skins and chopped ends of fruit rotting away as flies circle its circumference.

Welcome to the fruit stall.

Since travelling we’ve become attuned to what’s in season and what each place does best, and have subsequently spiralled into some kind of unnamed fruit addiction. One that now quietly drives the intent of our days.

In Thailand, mango is king. A serving at breakfast with yoghurt. A mango smoothie with lunch to cool off after a day at the beach. The ubiquitous mango sticky rice from a street vendor, shared as dessert from a plastic tray.

Mango smoothies, Koh Kood - bliss!

Dragon fruit, with its otherworldly shape and bright purple flesh speckled with black seeds. The tartness of passion fruit, enough to awaken the sleepiest mid-afternoon lull. Pineapple with its thirst-quenching sweetness.

Visiting a street market in the evening and grabbing a fruit smoothie for around 50p, freshly made in front of you, is now one of life’s simple pleasures. The quiet corner in a pub temporarily dethroned by a plastic stool in a makeshift seating area alongside endless rows of parked scooters.

Galle fruit market, Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, mango is readily available, but it’s much more floral in flavour. Something to be savoured rather than devoured.

Banana dominates here. Hanging from every nook and cranny of a stall. Big ones, little ones and even red ones. Sweeter and creamier than those I’m used to at home. A visit to the fruit vendor here often results in a free sample pressed into your hand as you navigate the busy streets.

Daily fruit stall rituals

Back at the fruit stall, the elderly Sri Lankan man is hacking away at a papaya, revealing pale orange flesh that reminds me of the hues of the sun setting over the Indian Ocean. The dark brown seeds are scooped away and forgotten. Eating the cool papaya feels like the perfect antidote to the most humid of days.

The stall holder hands us our clear plastic bag of fruity goodness, sticky to the touch. We pay and dodge our way back past a mound of bananas on the floor.

Another deal done. Another bag of tropical goodness secured.

The daily ritual of the fruit stall isn’t always pretty, but it is always rewarding.

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Trattoria Aldo

We take a left from the busy streets of the market. Catania is as edgy as I recall - the dark grey buildings, narrow streets and looming Mount Etna giving it a totally different feel to the baroque hillside towns of the Val Di Noto, where we have just come from.

With a turn we enter a street that is strewn with half empty boxes and litter from the market stalls and one which is far quieter, almost devoid of people. We quickly approach a sign saying ‘Aldo, piano no.1’ with an arrow pointing up a suspect looking staircase.

We head up and I try my best to look confident and unfazed at stepping into the unknown, all the while wondering if this is going to be worth the impeccable tip off I’ve been given to visit here.

Simplicity is king at Trattoria Aldo

Through some glass doors at the top of the stairwell and we are into a wood-panelled heaven (always a hallmark of a quality traditional eatery, in my experience), adorned with a mix of paintings featuring early 20th century Paris and in a shift in artistic taste, clowns. A smattering of Christmas lights flash to a sombre rhythm in the near-empty dining room. We are early to lunch by Italian standards and as such, pretty much have the place to ourselves.

We are seated at a simple table with a paper table cloth and passed a menu with a mix of typed and handwritten items. The service is prompt and we opt for the becaffico (meaning little fig-pecking bird) - grilled sardines stuffed with breadcrumbs, herbs, raisins and pine nuts. Orata (bream), tomato salad and the antipasto option, which at Aldo is a buffet option containing an excellent range of vegetable dishes such as grilled courgettes, caponata, fritatta, spinach, wild mushrooms and fried cauliflower, to name but a few. 

Antipasti selection - a real bargain and a great way to eat

However, the best is yet to come as when we ask for a glass of wine each, the waiter tells us that we “might as well” order the half-litre carafe of wine as it’s only €4 instead of the €5 for two glasses. Not wanting to let stereotypes of tight fisted Yorkshiremen down, I eagerly accept. We chat about how ridiculously well-priced it is, for what turns out to be better than many white wines you’d pay at least twice as much for, by the glass, in a bar at home.

Our food arrives and we select our antipasti from the communal buffet table and dig in. Everything is so simply cooked, but to a very good level of quality. There’s no pretension here. The food does all of the talking and as we eat, we discuss that these types of places are far more enjoyable to dine in than many restaurants with a higher price tag, for a lower standard. 

Our meal, including the excellent beccafico

It felt so connecting eating in a trattoria such as this, whose only opening hours are 7 am to 4 pm - a reflection of its position by the market and its main clientele. These are exactly the types of places I want to eat when travelling, as they’re unashamedly local, have tasty dishes at a very reasonable price and have the kind of aesthetic that’s now a dying breed.

Here’s to places like Trattoria Aldo continuing for many more years yet!

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