Today we’re back in Trieste so I can  reveal the mother of all serendipitous things that happened to us in the city of serendipity. 

Now I should first explain that for whatever reason, Chris and I fell into a rather relaxed — read lazy — pattern that whole week in Trieste. We didn’t go to any museums, but rather spent most of our days trying different cafes, in the morning for coffee, in the evening for aperitivos. In between the cafes our main adventure each day was to wander around, see the city, and above all else find a restaurant in which to have lunch.

One day we decided to try to find a restaurant that one of Chris’ former colleagues had recommended. Before we left the apartment that morning, we opened the website page for the restaurant in the Internet browser on our iPad, so we’d have the address and a map to find it as we walked through town. We then stopped — as usual — at a coffee bar for a morning coffee, and we took out the iPad to check the address as we were sipping our coffee.

But … we couldn’t get view the page we’d left open on the iPad back int he apartment, because the iPad insists on reloading it, even if it’s already been loaded, and even if you’re not connected to the Internet. Which means that the page just displays as an error page, since it can’t reload, since you’re not connected to the internet.  That’s a most maddening design flaw, IMHO.

However, all was not lost. The barista at the coffee bar was friendly, so we asked her if she’d heard of the restaurant and knew where it was, since it was (we thought) fairly close by, we just didn’t remember the address exactly. And what do you know, she did indeed know exactly where it was,  and she kindly gave us directions to it.

But then, as we were leaving, she slipped us a business card for another place, saying that if the one we’d asked her about didn’t work out , we could try her friend’s place, as it was very good (she said). Hmm, do you trust a recommendation like that? It’s always hard to know if you’re just being lured into a “friend’s” place that will turn out to be touristy and not very good.

But we thanked her in any case and set off on our way. Following her directions to our original target, we easily found the restaurant — which turned out to be closed on Sundays.

Did I mention this was a Sunday? Right. Argh.

Ah well. All was still not lost. We pulled the business card from the barista’s friend’s place, since maybe that needed to be an option after all. However,  when we tried to find the street for the friend’s place on on our little tourist map of Trieste, the street wasn’t on the map. And we hadn’t gotten directions to that place from the barista.

Double-argh.

So our only option at that point was just  wandering  around a bit, hoping to chance upon another restaurant that was open on a Sunday. We walked for a few minutes before spying sign sign for a restaurant “near the oldest Roman arch in Trieste.” Sounds interesting, eh?  The sign’s map wasn’t exactly accurate, so we wandered around some backstreets for about 10 more minutes before finally finding that Roman arch (shown in yesterday’s post); the restaurant was to the right of the arch. The restaurant door was open, but when we went in it turned out that they weren’t serving lunch that day.

However, we had another plan. During that 10 minutes of wandering we’d noticed that a restaurant called “Osteria No” was open, so we decided to go back to find it.  However, with all the twists and turns we’d taken, we wound up taking a slightly wrong turn. But, once we realized that, we decided to  keep going, figuring we could intersect the “No” street we wanted another way, rather than having to retrace all of our steps.

As we approached where we needed to take a right turn to go to No, we passed the back entrance for what was clearly a cafe. We decided to take a left (instead of the right) to check  out the cafe, as we were building up quite an appetite what with all the wandering around.

On the downside, turning left brought us to the front of the cafe, and showed us that it was really just a glorified coffee bar and not an option for lunch.

On the upside, though, turning left brought us another street. We read the street sign and, lo and behold, we had just stumbled onto the street that the barrista friend’s restaurant was on! The street that hadn’t been on our map! Amazing. Although we still had reservations about the way we’d gotten the recommendation, we decided to take a chance on it and went in for lunch.

And…. it was by far the best meal we had in Trieste! The owners were wonderful and very friendly. The woman gave us the menu “a voce” (i.e., verbally, not written down), and as Chris commented to me later, we actually were fairly Italian, in that we listened to the menu and immediately made our choices; that’s not something we usually do that quickly, even though it was what we saw Italians do all the time.

For the wine, the guy came over and explained some options, then brought us 3 different ones to taste, so we could try them before we settled on a bottle to buy.

wine from the Serendipitous meal in Triest

Our complete meal:

– Orecchiette pasta (from Puglia) with a sauce of orata (sea bream) and calamari (squid). Outstanding!
– Orata (sea bream) baked in a shredded potato crust. The flavor of the fish under the potato crust was outstanding: juicy and flavorful.
– Wine
– 2 local digestivo drinks to finish

Consider the the high quality and large quantity of the food, it wasn’t even that expensive. We were so full we had no room for dessert. But on the way back to the hotel we did manage to stop at yet another coffee bar and happened to have one of the best espressos of the trip. A marvelous end to our accidental afternoon adventure on a Sunday in Trieste.

BTW, I meant what I said above. It really was the “mother” of all serendipity, as it wasn’t just any Sunday. It was Mother’s Day.