WHEN IN SCOTLAND...

A few summers ago I was lucky enough to take the family with me for a month to Edinburgh, Scotland. I was performing in Henson's Puppet Up at the Fringe Festival. We did two shows a day, six days a week. There wasn't always a lot of time to explore and do fun, touristy kind of things.

We crammed as much sightseeing we could into that one day off a week. The castle. The countryside. Museums.

But the one thing we really hadn't experienced was traditional Scottish food. So, with one day off left, my wife, daughter and I piled into a cab in search of something unique to eat.

In his thick brogue, the cab driver asked us where we wanted to go. (On a side-note, every time we got in a cab in Edinburgh and the driver asked us where we wanted to go, my daughter would loudly ask, "What's that man saying? I can't understand him!") Anyway, we told the driver to take us to someplace where the locals go for dinner.

The driver quickly began maneuvering the taxi through the narrow streets of Old Town. He was going fast. He knew just the place! We made our way up steep inclines, back down through even more narrow streets. We were deep within a part of Edinburgh that the tourists never see. It was mysterious. Magical. Dark. Old. Creepy. Old. It was as if our taxi was taking us back through time. The roads got narrower. The cobblestone more decayed. We drove on. And on. And suddenly we were there. At...

The Olive Garden.

The driver said the pasta was pretty good.