Over the course of a road trip across America, I was lucky enough to spend plenty of interstate time with my friend Andrea Armeni. One of the things we discussed at length was the question of in what circumstances the search for culinary authenticity turns farcical.

Florence Fabricant, in a recent article, embodies a common attitude amongst American food writers when she reveals the results of an exhaustive search for the true recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana, one of Italy’s most beloved pasta dishes: “After half a dozen plates of it during a recent trip to Italy, one detail became clear: for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale—cured, unsmoked pig jowl.”

Although it would be a difficult hypothesis to test empirically, Andrea and I had the same immediate reaction to this statement—his from growing up in Italy, mine from living there for a while: in Italy, almost nobody would care in the least bit whether pasta all’amatriciana were “authentic.” (more…)

The relationship between tourists and the places that they like to go has been ambivalent since tourism—travel as entertainment—became a real global industry in the early 1900s. Sometimes cities become caricatures of themselves, molded into their own exaggerated and inauthentic images abroad. Other times, they just become ugly high-rise beach resorts or overcrowded, overpriced wastelands.

But then there are some places where something completely different happens—where the intersection of tourists and locals has spun off, across the years, into something newer and stranger than could ever have been contemplated by either party to begin with.

To say that Amsterdam, where pot, mushrooms, and hallucinogenic substances of all sorts are legal, is only about the drugs would be to adopt a narrow perspective on the city. But Amsterdam is about the drugs, and one of the funniest things about the middle-aged American tourists that visit Amsterdam in droves, most for the first time, many with their children, 

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