Unlock the digestive of free editor
Roula Khalaf, the FT editor, chooses her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Traveling by train is better for the environment. It is a roof of slow travel movement. You can see the world spend while taking a look at a simpler life. Cool well. All valuable considerations, but not the ones that prompted my long and long journey to the European railways.
There were two main reasons: a healthy airport anger and the discovery that Interrail was still one thing. It was on a plane (irony) that we talked to an elderly couple who would just spend Europe by train for almost the same price as a return from London to Manchester.
Interrail! I thought a) was inhabited by Brexit, and b) was the under-24 storage. It turns out that none of these things is true. Hold me back.
After Hannibal-Crossing-the-Alps levels, the trip went as follows: London, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Modena, Bologna and Naples. And then Villa San Giovanni where the train is divided into two to go to Sicily – with ferry. This is one of the last passenger trains to do so, and when I first heard about it, it broke out. The article of the bucket list, even if the reality turned out to be a little more municipal than the mind.
So I left on a chaotic stations, a lot of trains, platform occasional panic – and a lot of railroad food. Things started badly. I usually avoid offers in the Eurostar that have endured their savagery of a risotto, but still somehow found myself in possession of a cheese and baguette bacon so clumsy and influenced, it bent like a foam plane pillow. From this point on, however, each train opened a box with the pleasure of the buffet cars.
There were menus from the chefs by great name. Standing to Geneva, “the best of French and Swiss products” came through Michel Roth (from BayView restaurant with Michelin city). In a modular cafe carriage with high plastic tables, it was impossible to resist Roth’s de Canard with Pommes de Terre sarladises in what looked like a glass jar. Nothing except the duck, potatoes, aromatic, duck fat, salt – not an addition to appearance. In its fragrant uniformity, beige, it enjoyed as real food, actual cooking, duck fat ringing, rosemary and garlic.
Oh the sparkle of rapid Frecciarossa, competing from Bologna in Naples, where uniformed wild staff served small sweet rolls filled with cheese and bacon (like those you get to Florence Procci) directly in our luxury places. And the mustachioed ticket inspector looked like a matinee idol. The famous chef here was Carlo Cracco of Italy CapeAnd there were hot dishes on the offer – black rice with mazzancolle (big prawns) with curry and cumin, maybe? – But I settled on some very good crudo prosciutto served with dill bread and a half -fiction bottle. And to think that my UK train foods are usually a twix and a tea bag.
My favorite snack came from the Geneva-Milan foot, on a brain furnished with that rare thing, a table-covered dining machine: a deep cup loaded with small smoked sausages, wet with frames and pickles and served with a mustard tube all admirations for the Balkan simplicity. I could have had steak tartars or a wonderful Swiss plate of pasta filled with minced beef, fried onions, apple sauce and sbrinz cheese. But those short sausages, paradise. The other three hours on this train would not be a daily job, dreaming of my way through a dramatic landscape of mountains, draped lakes with a haunted smoke veil.
Which other travel method offers such fun? This costs, for the whole trip, about £ 350 in the head – including Eurostar and first grade from Paris on? It allows you to take advantage of a change of station in Paris to wash in beauty – and now, good cooking – let Train Bleu in Gare de Lyon. To Gawp in the food concessions of foreign stations: Hello, nachos immersed with liquid cheese in the bloody bar in Geneva; Gamberini in Bologna and its small herds filled with mature eggplants; Taralli designer in Napoli Central. Then to grab an Arancino from a pleasant cafeteria of a ferry, while the train waits in a deck below.
And – Hallujah – When you stop in Modena, after scoring a table in Osteria Francescana, one of the excellent restaurants in the world, you can drink. Cin Cin!
Next year, I am planning a northern trip: Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna. . . This time, I will pack smarter: the only adventure weakness was raising big, excessive platforms to the platform. I honestly hope and believe there will be sausages.
Learn first about our last stories – Follow the magazine ft Weekend On X AND Weekend ft at Instagram
