“Fusion cuisine”—by which various elements of various Eastern and Western food cultures are combined in both artful and wacky ways—may seem a contemporary, if passé, culinary buzzword.

But nowhere does the term make more sense than in the beautiful port city of Trieste and its surrounding region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in northeastern Italy, where you may just as easily hear dialects of German and Slovenian as Italian.