Eat where the grandmothers eat

Every travel generation invents a rule for finding the real restaurant. Follow the taxi drivers, we were told, back when taxi drivers ate lunch. Then it was follow the workmen, and the workmen started bringing sandwiches. The apps arrived and promptly ruined everything they touched, because a restaurant that is good on the internet is soon a restaurant for people who found it on the internet.

The rule that survives is older and simpler: eat where the grandmothers eat. Not the grandmothers performing Sunday lunch for eleven descendants — the grandmothers alone, on a Tuesday, at a table they clearly consider theirs. A woman of seventy-four who has cooked forty thousand meals does not surrender her lunch hour to mediocrity.

A woman who has cooked forty thousand meals does not surrender her lunch hour to mediocrity.

How to read the room

• One grandmother, alone, with wine: excellent sign. She is a regular; regulars are the audit.
• Paper tablecloth over linen: they spend money where it matters.
• A handwritten menu shorter than ten lines: someone shopped this morning.
• The waiter argues with her about what she should order, and loses: sit down immediately.

In the market at Ortigia we followed the rule to a room with six tables and no sign, where the day’s fish was recited, not printed, and the bill was worked out on the tablecloth itself. It was the best meal of the month. The second-best was in Seville, same method, half the price of the place the app had ranked first — a place which, when we walked past it, was full of people photographing bread.

The rule is not really about food. It is about borrowing, for one lunch, the judgement of someone who has spent a lifetime refusing to waste an afternoon. That judgement is the scarcest thing in travel, and it cannot be downloaded.