A New Year's Eve to Remember - Or The Hunt For The Great Meal

Let's start at the end. The end of the last day of 2009. The end of our trip down South to Pompeii and the beautiful island of Ischia. Picture the scene, a hotel rooftop overlooking Vesuvius with firecrackers exploding across the night sky. Two happy families from opposite sides of the pond joining together to celebrate in Italy on New Years Eve.

And what better way to celebrate than with that traditional Italian New Year's delicacy 'il Ambourger'. But not any burgers. This is not the UK remember, this is Italy and this the south with it's fertile volcanic soil, it's amazing bakers, it's wonderful ingredients, it's love of food. So these are no ordinary burgers, these are super ordinary - ambourger ordinarissimo.

For encased in a sesame seed bun of the kind I thought you couldn't even get here in Italy, is a tough gray oval of mdf that must surely have come from Tesco's value range. This is no 'il Mac'. No, this is a burger worthy of an English B road burger van. And this is New Year's Eve in Italy.

We do our best with our limited supply of ketchup sachets and we toast 2010 with crap red wine or milk in plastic cups. Goodbye 2009 on this NYE  to remember.

The reason for the burgers was NYE. Nearly everywhere was closed. The usually bustling streets around our hotel were deserted. We wanted pizza and the only place open selling pizza refused us takeaway. We were late back from Naples - the home of pizza. We'd walked dimly lit backstreets searching for authentic Neapolitan pizza but the place we were looking for was closed too. A restauranteur took mercy on us and dispatched us with a carrier bag filled with insipid, saladless burgers wrapped in foil.

Maybe if we hadn't been late coming back from Ischia we would have had more time to find somewhere open. But we were late coming back because we were late having lunch. Over an hour we had waited (with 4 very hungry kids) at Il Pontile after the waiter had taken our order for salads, pasta al pomodoro, burger. He then had the temerity to berate us for complaining about the slow service. The food was 'ok'. The experience wasn't.

Maybe we would have left our hotel earlier if, the previous night, we hadn't been out late living it up in a ristorante 'speciale' where the owner sat down with us and created a menu 'degustazione' before ours eyes with some of his favourite dishes that he described so effusively I was expecting him to weep when he had finished composing the menu. I wept when I saw the bill. And I wondered what it was that was so 'speciale'. And I longed for that increasingly elusive 'great meal' in Italy.

But the food (and the service) was better than the night before at the restaurant nearer our hotel. Where this time the owner ignored us, the mussels were still bearded and the secondi took half an hour to arrive after we had finished the primi.

And so it is that 2010 begins with a desire and determination to have a great meal in Italy. To sit and eat our way through three or so courses of great food and to get to the end and think ..... that really was a great meal. I think that is going to be easier without 3 kids in tow but with or without them we'll find it.