I was sitting at a table for two as a party of one in a restaurant in Trento (Italy), mulling over the choices on the menu. I was alone, but let’s face it, solo travel isn’t what it used to be. You can just about always phone a friend.
Which is what I did. I texted a photo of the menu to my mother (I’m lucky I can still do that), who had left for home from Roma after two weeks of travel together. Texting the menu started out as a joke and then became a habit suggested by a French couple I know living in Toulouse.
“Send us a photo of the menu. We’ll help you choose,” they texted, when I asked for their input on what to eat in Lourdes, famous for religious pilgrimage in the French Pyrenees.
My mom texted back.
“White truffles? Do it. How many times can you get white truffles with pasta?”
“Almost never.”
The main dish?
“The quail looks like the best thing on the menu,” she wrote. “I’m sure all the dishes are good. It’s just that quail is different.”
I can’t say I was starving when I arrived at the restaurant. I did log a few thousand steps that day, but by grazing from chocolate shop to chocolate shop and pasticceria to pasticceria. For the record, I had worked hard to reach the restaurant in Trento. I flew from LA to Chicago – to meet up with my mother –, from Chicago to Paris, Paris to Toulouse, and then took a train from Toulouse to Lourdes. From Lourdes I took a train to Marseille, from Marseille to Nice, another flight from Nice to Firenze, a train from Firenze to Roma, a train from Roma to Verona, and a train from Verona to Trento, with a few subway and taxi rides in between.
I knew I would pass through Trento on my way to Munich from Verona, but not for an overnight. I have enough friends in Europe (I have more friends in Europe than in my hometown of Los Angeles) to have backup plans to the backup plans. But all I ever really need is a credit card. It’s easy enough to take a train to another city in Europe and find a hotel if all else fails. Sometimes you have to let go of expectations.
My research on Trento beforehand amounted to nothing, nulla as they say in Italian. The only advice my Italian friend in Verona had to give was to go there, as she had never been to Trento herself.
“I’m just sending you where people tell me to go,” she said.
So I stepped off the train with all the wonder you have of never having been somewhere. Le Dolomite were to one side of the train station and the town center was to the other. The train station was a slight upgrade over some of the stations in small towns where you get dropped off in the middle of nowhere on one side of the tracks, and it’s down the stairs through an underpass and up again to reach the other side. Only because there were more tracks. I still had to navigate a staircase and an underpass with my suitcase.
I typed the name of my hotel into Google maps and found it was an easy five-minute walk from the station, most of it through a park where booths were being set up for the Christmas market.
After a quick turnaround in my hotel room, I headed out, without having looked at a map of the city, and just started to walk to catch as much of Trento in the daylight, shadow that would soon be dark in mid-November. I discovered a town right out of a big picture book, complete with a castle (Castello del Buonconsiglio), rows of gelato-colored buildings decorated with dark-stained wooden trim, porticos characteristic of other northern Italian towns like Bologna, and feel good messages on chalkboard signs, “If you have a problem, add olive oil.”
And oh, a lifetime of options for bringing tastebuds you didn’t know you could have into existence. I started with chocolate and found my way to focaccia, a pistachio cornetto, pane croccante, and microbreweries. The microbreweries threw me. I didn’t think there would be much of a choice after speeding by the patchwork of military-aligned vineyards for an hour on the train from Verona.
“Not sure if I should drink beer or wine with dinner,” I texted my mother.
“Can’t go wrong with either one, just depends on what you are going to eat,” my mother wrote back.
My research for a restaurant that night was on the ground. I took notes during the day – photos of restaurants and their menus so I could find them again. I was leaning towards a more traditional Trentino menu – more dumplings (canederli) and fish, less bolognese. But my “I’ll know when I see it” strategy wasn’t leading me to anywhere I thought I wanted to eat at.
I texted my brother I wasn’t sure I was interested in any of the restaurants I’d come across.
Or it was my bias. The city has a large student population (Università di Trento), and most of the restaurants on the main piazzas were packed with students.
“Don’t be so quick to judge,” he texted back.
I kept circling the major piazzas, after a while like a wind-up toy with the wheels stuck on one side, each with its own renaissance cathedral or church, in search of the perfect restaurant. I finally surrendered to Googling my way to a fine dining experience. At the top of the list was Ristorante Antica Trattoria Due Mori. I went there to check out the menu although it was still too early to be seated. Four Italians stopped in front of the restaurant while I was scanning the menu.
“Remember when we ate there?” one of the men said in Italian.
“No, no,” the others said.
“Sì, remember? We sat right there,” the man said.
I understood so I asked, “Is it good?”
“Yes,” a woman responded to me in Italian. “But you will never get in if you don’t have a reservation.”
I vowed to return anyway. It was a Tuesday night in the middle of November, a shoulder season, with many local businesses closed for a brief holiday before Christmas shopping would begin. And I was a party of one. I’ve never had a problem getting seated as a single. A restaurant in Milan even had a table just for singles where I sat next to an Italian TV anchor and discussed the advantages of solo travel.
I’d have to return to Due Mori in another hour, but I didn’t want to go back to my hotel room in the meantime. A normal person might have sat down on one of the fur-lined chairs in the main piazza and ordered a cocktail. I found a spot in a secluded piazza on a bare bench made of cement, the temperature about as warm as if it had been carved out of snow.
I looked around my surroundings. A maroon-colored building to my right, traditional Italian lace curtains hanging in white-framed windows, caught my eye.
Another restaurant?
I got up to take a look, a little reluctant to leave my spot, even though it hadn’t warmed up a fraction of a degree. I crossed through a small area separated from the piazza by potted plants where a few outdoor tables sat and headed for what appeared to be a menu hanging in a glass window in the wall. The menu was brief, always a good sign in my opinion, an indication that the restaurant focuses on preparing what they are good at. Like my philosophy on gelaterias, the ones with fewer flavors and bland colors (run if there’s blue gelato) make gelato from their own recipes.
I made up my mind then. I was staying put until the restaurant opened. I didn’t have the energy to continue running around looking for a restaurant. I didn’t even want to take a chance on Due Mori recommended by Google and the Italians, even if I could find it again.
I still had to wait another 30 minutes. 19:30 came and even a couple minutes past, but no activity. I got up to open the door myself. It was locked. I peered inside. People were moving around, and the lights were on.
“There has to be another way in.”
I walked back through the passageway and around until I found myself on the other side of the building I had just tried to enter. A glass-paned door with a sign over the top, Osteria Il Capello.
I entered and asked in Italian, “For one?”
“Sì.”
A little fist pump to myself as the man showed me to my table for two.
I followed my mother’s suggestion and ordered the white truffles with tagliolini for my first course, and the quail for my main dish with a glass of pinot nero.
An amuse bouche, a tartlet with liver and leeks, and assorted bread – grissini and focaccia – arrived before my tagliolini. The bread was so good, I thought for a moment I would pack it up in my pockets like someone I knew used to do before it left my table.
My first bite into the white truffles on the fresh made tagliolini with butter made me think, “My five-year old niece has the right idea about how to eat homemade pasta – dripping with warm butter.”
The quail arrived thereafter, a small bird served with pumpkin puree and grilled radicchio, both seasonal vegetables.
“Buono,” I said when my server asked about the food.
For dessert, I was going to go with a typical Trentino pastry, apple strudel, a remnant of the history of northern Italy which was once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The strudel had cream in it, which I can’t have, as did all the desserts except for one, the lemon tart with meringue.
Too bad.
After I finished the tart, the kind that disappears too soon, I waited for my check. I sat for a while, making some notes in my travel journal, until I thought it was long enough. The restaurant wasn’t busy, so I thought they were just being polite.
“Do I pay at the table?” I finally asked in Italian.
“No, at the cashier,” my waiter said.
Right. I forgot that the system is to pay at the cashier in some restaurants in Italy.
I left without glancing through the giant picture window in the main dining area, there for the customers to watch the chefs at work in the kitchen. The full window was just out of my view which would have been a perfect preoccupation for a single diner.
I meandered through the streets back to my hotel and that was the end of a night on my own. My smart phone had made my overnight in Trento possible – I bought my train tickets and booked my hotel online. I still found the restaurant the old-fashioned way, by accident.
My dinner at Osteria Il Capello was not the five-course degustation dinners I’d enjoyed with my mother in France. Maybe it was better in a way that matters, as a minor triumph in the book of solo travel.
Books…
Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)
An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)
Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square
Janice Nigro 
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