Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - Rhett Went To Italy (Stories From Good Mythical MORE)

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

We hear all about Rhett's trip to Italy and his controversial take on Italian food.

What kind of hijinks did this guy get into in Italy? Welcome to Good Bithical Moore. So you went to Italy. Finally, I went to Italy, something that Jesse and I have been talking about doing for years. For a long time. We talked about doing it for our 10-year anniversary. It didn't work out. We talked about doing it for our 20-year anniversary, and then COVID happened,

and we just celebrated 25 years. That's amazing. And it's amazing. And I've topped you about one and, but I'm not gonna point that out. And I'm gonna catch up with you. Okay. The, uh, but it'll be because of death.

May it be because of death? May it be because of death? Why would we say that? Well, I don't, I would- How would you agree to that? Hold on. You agree to that. I guess no.

The only way I can be married longer than you is if you die before me. I'd rather died and divorce my wife. And you just agreed to it. I would rather die than divorce, Christy. May it be to the death. So anyway, we went to Italy. Jenna, I know that you're excited to hear about this

because you're a traveling woman. Yes, I am. I haven't been to Italy, so I'm excited to hear all the stuff, any advice you got, give me it all. Okay. We're on the boot. So, great question. The only reason I ended up going to Italy at all

was because you had been slated for jury duty. That's right. And it's like, when you got jury duty, I can't, if we're not, one guy's not here, the other guy can't do anything. Might as well go to Italy. I mean, because originally I was gonna do like a local thing, but we were, oh, you know, like that week,

I could just be out of the country. Oh, and by the way, Jenna. And then I just got a jury summons. I just saw that again. Another one. You get one every year. They want me to be on a jury so bad, I guess I'm gonna have to do it.

I also moved my jury duty. I know, after all that. So, because I was like, we're rescuing to Italy. I wanna go on vacation too. And so you just move your jury duty. Yeah. And so now I'm going to go to Italy again.

Hey! And then I got Jerry duty, you can go to Italy. No, that's not how it works. Anyway, so making the decision as to where we would go, that was a big thing because there's so many beautiful places you can go. Obviously, you've got Florence, you've got Rome, you've got Venice, you've got the Amofi Coast, and lots of other places that I haven't mentioned. Jesse and I wanted to have a somewhat relaxing vacation,

and so we just made the sort of what might, you might call it gut-wrenching decision to just completely take Rome out of the equation. Like, I'm not even going to go to the big main place with all the stuff because I'm just going to take it out of the equation and we'll go back for another time. Okay.

And so many people had talked to Florence because they're like, it's walkable and there's art and the food is good and all this stuff. So we were like, okay, well, let's do Florence and then let's go down to take the train for the second half of the trip to the Malfi Coast because I've just seen how beautiful that is. And I was on Croatia a couple years or last year,

a couple years ago. And that's the other side. And that's the other side of that sea. And it's beautiful and I've always heard that Italy's even more beautiful. Actually, sorry, it's not the other side. I'm on the west side. So I'm still in the Mediterranean,

but it's the same deal in terms of like beautiful rocky cliffs. Coastline, okay. So as you can imagine, I was so excited about the food. because I'm so food-motivated. I'm like a dog. You've got a hair over your left eyelash. Should I put it in the... No.

Well, it's yours. It's still attached. It's gone now. And Jesse is equally excited about the food. Also, the history, I'm into the history and the art and all this stuff. But the first night, we go to a highly recommended restaurant that had, like, you know, had, like, celebrities and pictures on the wall. with, it's like, oh, there's Bruce Springsteen has been here.

Bon Jovi has been here. Wow. You know, that kind of restaurant. Okay. And we ate there and we thought, I'm sure Joe Pesci, but I didn't find his picture, but I didn't look for it. Okay. The food was good, but the food wasn't like the best food I've ever had, the best Italian food I've ever had, even. It wasn't even as good as my favorite Italian restaurants in Los Angeles.

So I was like, what is happening? And then Jesse was like, let's reset here. we had made a bunch of reservations, but our month leading up to leaving for Italy was absolutely crazy, and so we didn't do the best job of planning. And so she was like, let's just like do some research and see what places we can get in.

And so we completely redid our reservations for Florence for the next three nights. Oh. Sometimes that's good, by the way. Like, not overplan, but just saying, I'm going to go here. Yes, he was saying, but as you will learn, maybe that's not the case.

Okay. As we were waiting, that second day that we were there, the second day, we were like, let's get some history in. We were gonna go to do a tour of the Academia Museum or whatever it's called where David, Michelangelo's David is. And a bunch of other sculptures of these guys who were like, he didn't completely finish the sculpture, but it's like on purpose, it kind of looks like Han Solo

coming out of the ice or whatever. And so he's got those, carbonite, carbonite leading up to the David. Saw the David, learned about the David, why the hands are bigger and all this stuff, why the head is so big, because they thought it was gonna be on top of the church, but then it wasn't, and it's cool, and he was young.

But it's bigger than you think it's gonna be over. It's big, it's real big. It's like the opposite of seeing the Mona Lisa. His penis is not that big. I mean, it's large, you know, compared to, but relative to him. I didn't wanna know. And, but then we were gonna take a little trip up the dome,

So the Duomo, which is this huge cathedral. Like if you see the skyline in Florence, you see this big church dome. And it's like really famous for, is the largest dome in the world up to a certain point because of the way they designed it. And so we show up for the tour of the dome that day. And the guy says,

like, oh, you're going to need something to cover your shoulders but you can't go into a church with your shoulders on cover it, which is something we should have known because the same thing is true in Portugal and we had just forgotten. What happens to your shoulders? Is it like... God doesn't like shoulders.

Do you not get it? Okay. And so we went to... I got her little shawl that she, like, wore over the top of her shoulders. Okay. And then we get ready to... She cosplay as an old lady. Because the guy was like, you need to get something to cover the shoulders.

And then we do some touring and we get ready to go into the dome. And the guy says, the tour guy looks at Jesse's legs and he's like, hmm. Your shorts are too short. You need something for that too. So we had to leave, go buy Jesse a whole outfit. Two more shawls. We bought her an outfit.

Maybe we're showing the picture of that outfit right now, but you don't get to see it because they don't have it pulled up. You being Link. But why would I... Because it's funny that we had to go buy an outfit. Oh, here it is. But is the outfit funny? I mean, it's not her first choice in outfits.

You wouldn't have bought it unless it was an emergency church climbing outfit. I mean, do they just, why don't they just sell pants and shawls running outside of them? That's what I said. but they don't. Anyway, we go out there. Sleeping bags with holes for feet. It was wonderful, the history and the art, and I was having a great time.

And then Jesse had made a reservation at this place where she was like, oh, this place is highly rated. It's like on like the eater list or whatever, which is usually a really good resource. And she had called them and they said, well, we don't have a normal, it's not a normal dinner tonight. It is a curated dinner. guy is coming in, a friend of the chef

and he's like curating a dinner with wine pairings and we're like, well, that sounds great. So we walk across the bridge and in the neighborhood, you go walk everywhere. We get there and the guy comes up to us and he kind of knew that we were Americans and he begins explaining, he was happy to see us, jovial guy, he was like, I'm the guy

who brings the wine to this restaurant. I'm the wine dealer or whatever he is, you know, and I'm friends with this couple. And I come into town from being out in the country And sometimes when I come into town, we do a special night where I curate a menu and I bring out the new wines that I've brought along and we eat, drink, and be merry

because tomorrow we may die. He didn't say the last part. And so I'm like, okay, this is gonna be great. This is gonna be wonderful. We're not big drinkers, but we're in Italy and let's just go for it. Yeah. And so he brings the first course out

and I could best describe it as grass. Imagine grass on a plate. Not hard to do. That's what this salad looked like and it's kind of what this salad tasted like. But I was like, hey, we're just getting started. The wine's better with a wine. And then it brings out the second course

and it was a very clear soup that I could only best describe as water. So we, so course one grass, course two water. We are very much in like bovine meal territory at this point. You are the cow. I am the cow. I guess I'm being fattened for something. Did the wine pair nicely with the grass in the water?

The wine actually was really good wine. But the second thing that I noticed is that we had arrived to 8.30 and it was 9.30 and I'd only had water and grass. We proceeded to stay at this place until 11.30. And it didn't get a lot better than watering grass. And we were just like, what is happening? We came to Italy. How many people were around eating this? The whole restaurant was full, but it's probably a restaurant that holds like 30. And did they seem?

They seem like they're having a great time. But I think they knew what they were getting into. It was like this is a little challenging to the palate. It was that kind of like chefy chef type thing. It was just too much for us. And we were just like, I just want a really good pasta. Like I'm in Italy and I want a really good pasta. Did you Google that?

Well, oh, hell yeah, I did. So then the second day, we had heard about this place. or the third day. The third day we had heard about this place. I'm not gonna say the name of the restaurant. Maybe I will after. Well, I'll tell the story then decide if I'm gonna save the name of the restaurant.

And we, oh, first of all that morning, we went to the Uffizi, I think is how you say it, gallery. So this is where you got like the Botticelli and stuff and the Botticelli paintings and it's incredible. It's like, you know, and we had a really good tour guide. I could barely understand him, but I understood him well enough to know that we were learning cool stuff.

And, but that night, again, I love the art, I love the history, but the food is my main thing, right? So lunch rolls around and we decided we were gonna go to this restaurant for lunch and we had read about it and they were like, this is like one of the best places in all of Florence. It is a mother and a son who run it and it's very small and this guy is sort of notorious for not liking American tourists.

Now one of the things you'll see all throughout Florence is this bumper sticker that says, Yankee go home. They don't like Americans. And there's a lot of Americans, especially American college students who are there like studying abroad. Just all these like college students going down the street at night, just making all kinds of noise. I mean, I would not be into it if I was Italian either, you know? And so I think this guy is kind of like he's sitting there doing like really good food, but he's kind of annoyed with all these people from the U.S. who are coming in and they don't speak Italian and they don't seem like they're trying to speak Italian. So we had heard that he

will be like kind of rude to you. But I was like, I am so desperate for some good pasta that I'm willing to be abused by this chef. And that can be part of it. And so we go, and we heard that what he's gonna do is he's gonna have a chalkboard with the menu written on it and he's gonna go through it, maybe in Italian if he's in a bad mood, and he's going to read the stuff

and then he's gonna look at you. And when he looks at you, that is your cue to just say what you want at that moment. And if you don't say what you want at that moment, he's gonna get upset. So Jesse's like, we need to go, and I'm like, I don't know. She's like, no, come on. If anything, it'll be a good story, which is always true.

Well, you're telling any story. We show up at the restaurant, and I go up to, he has written the chalkboard menu on the outside in Italian. And so I'm looking at it and I'm trying to figure out what it is, Google Translate. And then a guy with a baby who's walking outside who's obviously inside the restaurant with his family, but he's brought his baby outside, who looked like an American said, just do it, as he saw us looking at the menu. Like Nike? And he wasn't a Nike representative.

He was just an American man telling us that I know you're having trouble deciding if you want to do it. Just do it. This is the best restaurant in Florence. Okay. And then Jesse was like, yeah, but we heard he's really mean. He was like, well, he's very mean. But he's in a good mood today and it's worth it. Whatever happens, it's worth it.

It's the best food here. Okay. So we go in. And you still kind of don't want to because... I don't. I don't like, I just don't like uncomfortable situations, you know, it's just not my thing. And so, and I don't like, disappointing people.

You don't want to perturb somebody. And I had made, I had thought that I was gonna like learn some Italian like beyond like, bonjourno. Chow? And chow means food. I'm pretty much out at that point. Rivideate, you know, that kind of stuff. So you had nothing.

And so I was like, I can't really order the food in Italian, what are we gonna do? So he comes out to us and he holds the menu up and then he doesn't look happy, but then he starts speaking English. Oh. And he's like, just sort of like, his face is like this, he's like, we have ragu with wild boar,

we have this, this, we have this, this, this, this, this. Deadpan. You know, I'd already decided that I wanted the ragu with the wild boar. And I got it. And what the thing is is that after he finished with us, He goes to the couple next to us and they're Italians, and he's like, ha, hey, ho!

So good to see you! Like, he's speaking Italian in them and they're laughing, and he's like having the best time with them. Wow. Not with the Americans. But listen, I'm not mad. I get it. It's part of the thing, you know?

The food was incredible. It was really, really good pasta. But I also started to get this sneaking suspicion that we have really good food in this town. Can I just say that? We have really good food in Los Angeles. And you know what, that place in Chapel Hill and Carborough, that place, Tessaro that I took you to,

that's got really good pasta too. Like, it's, the pasta in Italy isn't even, it's not better than that. It's like, there's- I gotta say you're not, I don't really wanna go to Italy. There's a point. I love that you started whispering that, like, you were afraid to say it out loud.

People are just gonna be like, you don't know you didn't go to the right place, but I'm just saying that like, you can get so good at making something that you can't get that much better at it. And there's places all that, around the world where people have done that and this town is one of the places.

I'm just, I'm saying. I'm not going to. We had some excellent pizza, which is better than any of the pizza that I've had in this town. I will say that. But I want to save a little bit of time to talk about the second half of the trip,

which was going down to the Amofi Coast. So we decided to take the train. Florence was great, very happy that we went there, but at the end of the day I was like, I think we're probably gonna like, the Amofi Coast even more. That's just my suspicion. And we get on this train, we take it down to Naples,

and then we have like a taxi driver, drive us to the hotel in a place called Pasatano. And we, it was getting to be kind of late in the evening when we arrived. Check into the hotel, and then we just start walking through this town, and I was like, this is the coolest place I've ever been. In terms of, imagine just a town

that is like built into seaside, and then that is also has been there for like a thousand years what's it called Positano and so yeah if you pull up a picture of Positano for a link to see and then I'll show us in one of my I just want him to be able to see like you know what this place looks like yeah I've heard of that place I've heard good things it's absolutely beautiful is there a beach or just cliffs no there's cliffs that go down to a beach and then the whole cliff has the has all kinds like nooks you know I'm a big nooks and crannies guy yeah so like little

medieval paths that go through things, and then they've turned this old monastery into a hotel and that kind of thing. It's absolutely beautiful. I'm walking around and I'm thinking to myself, this is the most beautiful place I've ever been. This is as if they built a bunch of really cool architecture into the cliffs of Big Sur.

You know what I'm saying? Imagine like, you've kind of seen these kind of places. and we also ate at the hotel that night, and it was the best food we had the whole trip except for the one place in Florence. So then I get ready to go to bed. And I kind of notice as I'm getting ready to go to bed that my stomach feels a little tight,

just a little bit of a, like a little bit of a cramp in my stomach. But I think nothing of it. and we had planned an outing that first day to Capri, to like to get a boat ride to Capri, to go to Cusina Coupry. There you go. Okay. That's where we were. Oh.

And so the... That's nice. So, and we're like in a hotel right in the middle of all that. And you had, but you have to walk up there? Like, is that a lot of steps? No, it's all drones. You grab drones and they take your down. Oh, good. Nice. That's better.

Yeah. lots of walking, lots of steps. But then the second day, we were going to go down there to the beach and we were going to get a little boat ride to Capri, which is like an hour away. And Capri is supposed to be even more beautiful. But I wake up and I'm feeling like,

I wake up early and I'm like, my stomach is jacked up. And I go to the bathroom. And let's just say, if you had a herd from the outside, outside what was going on in the bathroom, it would just sound like somebody just taking a bucket of water

and pouring it into a toilet. Oh, God. Okay, you know what I'm saying? Okay, all right. Mm-hmm. And so then I get, I go back to the, I go back to the bed. Somebody serving that soup from- I go back to the bed and I'm like, Jesse,

I'm sick and she looks at me and she's like, I'm sick too. She goes to the bathroom, it sounds like somebody's pouring a bucket of water into the toilet. And that was, when we decided definitively that the meal that we had shared, the same exact dish that we had shared on the train

the day before at lunch was the chicken on the train, train chicken. And when we got that train chicken, we both looked at it and we both thought, this doesn't look right, it doesn't look great, it was just like, it said chicken medallions, but it was just like a piece of grilled chicken, and then we started eating it, and Jesse was like, this doesn't taste good.

And I was like, yeah, but it's all we got. And then I was also thinking, I think of all the things I've eaten on this show and I don't get food poisoning, we'll be fine. We got food poisoning. I had to call all the people who were going to do the boat trip. I said, we are sick, we are definitely not getting on a boat. We stayed in the hotel room in our first day,

full of day in Positano, back and forth. Thankfully, there was never a time when we both needed to empty the bucket, so to speak, at the same time. Wow. It was perfectly synced up where I would, like, give her a five as I went back to the bed. That's the bucket brigade.

Yeah, yeah, we're tag team. Oh, my God. And then you gotta start thinking about fluids because I was like, we are losing fluids, you know? So I'm just like drinking water. And then I just, I said, We'll be better by tomorrow, so let's just postpone the boat trip until tomorrow.

But then, Jesse was like, well, let's order, I'm so hungry, I'll just order a little food and we got a little room service. And I just had a little bit of food. And then at 2 a.m., back to the bathroom, bucket of water. 3 a.m., back to the bathroom, bucket of water. And so, and then Jesse was kind of getting over it,

but we had to call and just completely canceled. We had already paid for it, we couldn't get out of it. We paid, so we had to cancel the Capri thing, and then we just spent the day next to the pool, just ready and ready to get into the bathroom if we had to. But that night we ended up having a good meal. The food impositone was great.

Had a great meal that night, and we were basically better. And then the thing that I'd been looking for the whole trip, and I'm so glad we didn't have to cancel because it was fully better, Pompeii. So I've always wanted to go to Pompeii. How far is that from Positone? It's about an hour drive back towards Naples.

And of course, you remember, you remember, 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius. Oh yeah, it explodes. And then the people were frozen like statues and- Right. And interestingly, I always thought that they were like burned in place and like we were seeing their actual bodies when you see those famous pictures of like the bodies like woman holding a child or like somebody. What it was was that when Mount Vesuvius erupted,

it wasn't lava, it was volcanic ash and rock, very, very hot. And it came really, really fast, and it basically buried everybody very, very quickly. And then because it was a porous material, water seeped in when it rained, and their bodies decomposed really, really quickly. And then you had these perfect shells

of where a person was, kind of like a fossil that was surrounded by volcanic material. And then in the 1900s, some do figure out that if you found one of these cavities and you poured plaster into the top of it, and then you excavated around, you would get the perfectly posed body that, so it's not the body, it's the cavity

of the volcanic material where the body was, and then they're just plaster. And they've got many of them around Pompeii, which is absolutely giant. We did a three-hour tour with a tour guide of Pompeii and we saw like 15% of it. It's like a massive city. The houses are still like, they're all stone,

but like they're still intact. The frescoes are on the walls. And then the people are just standing in their houses? No, no. They've taken all of the people and all the objects out, put them in museums. A lot of it's in a museum in Naples, but then there's a couple of places where you walk in

and they've got like a glass case and there's like a dude in it like a plaster man. and the way he died or whatever. So wild. So they would pour. But the funny thing is, is we get there for this tour, and our tour guide,

cannot remember her name. Doesn't matter. Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I shouldn't say her name based on what I'm gonna say right now. And she was a great tour guide, but there was some eccentricities. The first thing that I noticed is that

as we were walking along, there's so many people there. Even though we went, you know, at like basically the beginning of June, there was already a lot of people, already a lot of people in Italy. And so you're like fighting with tourists and other tour groups and other people who are just like showing themselves around.

And this tour guy was so annoyed at all the other people like walking around, not knowing where they're going, like turning around in the middle of the path or whatever. In fact, and after a while she was like, I hate the people. Which is why I'm a tour. I hate people.

And we started asking questions, you know, we're curious people. We're asking questions and I met. So like when the eruption happened or whatever, and she was like, I will answer all questions about the eruption at the end of the door. And I'm like, a three hour tour, we're here, it's because of the eruption, right? And she's like, I'm gonna get to all your questions about the eruption at the end of the tour.

And so then I'm like, I guess I can't ask about the eruption. So she's telling us all these facts and it's incredible stuff. There's just incredible things that you learn. But I kind of stopped asking questions once I saw the way that she responded. Jesse kept asking questions. And then at one point she was like,

you ask so many questions. And she turns to me and she says, she's asked so many questions, she's so curious, she's like a baby. She's like a baby. She's like a baby. And I thought that was funny. I really did think that was funny.

But then we did get to the end, and that was when she answered all the questions about the eruption, and I learned the stuff about the way the plaster worked and how quickly it happened. She wanted to wait until you were at the right place. There was also a brothel that was like a waffle house menu where you had pictures of the sex positions that you would want to do, and you would point at them, and they were still on the wall.

Okay. You learned anything? I'd seen it all. Wow. But then, just to wrap up this story, what I'd learned about Pompeii was fascinating. And it turns out that that ended up being my favorite part of the trip, because I had good food, but again.

And you didn't have the runs. I didn't have the, I thought, I think Americans think that when they go to Italy, they're going to have every single place they go and every single meal they have is going to be the best thing they've ever had. And I think that might be the case, depending on what city you're in, but if you're in a great food city

where you basically can just go to a great restaurant at any time in any part of the city, you still had to do the same thing when you're in place like Italy. You gotta pick the right restaurants. But the history ended up being my favorite part. And in Positano, when Jesse was doing some shopping and I didn't wanna do,

I found a museum of an old Roman archeological site that was in the middle of the town. And you got tickets, you went under this church, there's like a thousand year old church right in the middle of town, but you go underneath it,

and they discovered that there was a Roman house from the year one. One. Mm-hmm. Yeah. A long time ago. Yeah, it sounds depressive, but then you remember BC.

Well, it could be one BC. So there is a house that basically what happened is, is when Mount Vesuvius erupted, it threw a couple of meters of volcanic ash and rock over the mountains onto Positano, killed a bunch of people, presumably, who were there, and also started to bury this house. And then a bunch of the volcanic material

that was on top of the mountain washed down with the subsequent floods and covered this house up to like 60 feet in some places. And they took many, many years, I don't remember when they discovered, but they discovered this like in the 17th century, like pretty recently. and they realized there's like this three-story,

amazing Roman house with these columns, and they've excavated down to this floor, this like living room. And the way that the volcanic material was up against the fresco painted inside the house, it preserved it. So when they took it off, there is this incredible painting on this wall

that's 2,000 years old that was in these people's homes. And it looks like somebody painted it like 20 years ago. Like it's faded, but it's like, And then above that, when the monks showed up. Was it sex positions? No sex positions. And there was just a home. When the monks showed up like a thousand years later

in like the 12th century or whatever, they built a monastery on top of that. And it had all of these like little chairs around it from where they would like set a monk after he died. And it was like a hole and it looked like a toilet. And it was like where they like drain their bodies. And they just like, put a lot of them around this thing.

And then when they came to build the church after that, they built it on top of that. So it was like the church, then there's the monastery with like the dead monks, and then there's this Roman house. That was maybe my favorite part of the whole trip. It's like a cake.

Yeah, it is. And they're continuing to excavate, and she said, if you come back in a few years, we're going to have a whole other room excavated. And I do think that that's the place I would go back, to, the coast was absolutely incredible. But I don't know, you go back to the same place

and you go to a new place when you travel. I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But I highly recommend it. I highly recommend Italy. I'm not trying to sound like some food snob and tell you that you just need to go to L.A.

and eat Italian food instead of going to-A. But that's kind of the subtext. But I would just say when I got back to L.A. And Jesse and I went out to this, restaurant for brunch in LA and we went to a place that actually was on Brittany's social media. Henrietta, she had been to this place called Henrietta and it had these sandwiches and I had this sandwich there and I was like, this is so good. This is just good as anything I had in Italy. Don't tell of the Italian. They don't like you anyway. I don't think you're burning any bridges. So yeah,

The moral of the story is we have great food in this city. And your wife's the baby. And don't eat the train chicken.