How to Eat and Drink in Venice by Lee Marshall
Featured Hotel in Venice
Bauer Il Palazzo
See all hotels in Venice >
You don't go to Venice to eat, the old tourist adage goes. You go to Venice for all sorts of other reasons - romance, Carnival, Don't Look Now, Tintoretto, trefoil arches, Peggy Guggenheim, or because that's where the cruise ship happens to be putting in today. Eating is done in tacky gondolier-a-go-go joints with a floorshow of stunned lobsters and smarmy waiters.
The old tourist adage was once mostly fact; now it's mostly fiction. Like the cranes and dredged canals that are - we are assured - making the city a better place to live in and look at, despite the pungent smell. Haltingly, Venice is rediscovering its pride, looking after its future by investing in its past.
In the kitchen, the revolution has come from below. Anyone looking to the Locanda Cipriani or Harry's Bar to salvage Venice's culinary tradition is onto a loser: these places are the guardians of a certain style of international comfort food that is as fertile as a wasp in amber. It's the traditional drinking dens of Venice - the bacari - that have come to the rescue.
Good Drinkers - Good Snackers...
Unlike most Italians, Venetians know how to drink. The sight of a local carpenter knocking back a spritz (white wine, soda water and campari) at 7am is enough to give even the most iron-livered northern visitor an inferiority complex. And unlike most Italians (who continue to hold out nobly against the ten-minute lunch), Venetians also know how to snack.
The traditional bacaro panders to these talents, serving a range of honest regional wines - sinewy Tocai, robust Raboso, soberly elegant Cabernet Franc - from huge demijohns, and offering tasty bar-counter snacks, or cicheti, to soak up the alcohol. Cicheti are the Venetian equivalent of Spanish tapas; favourite ones include baccalà mantecato (salt cod whipped to a creamy paste in olive oil), castraure (fresh young artichokes), and a whole supporting cast of seafood: folpeti (baby octopus), sarde in saor (sardines marinated in vinegar, pine nuts, onions and raisins), masanelle (tiny green crabs, eaten shells and all), cicali di mare (mantis shrimps). Meat features too, with filling polpetti (meatballs) fronting more recherché delicacies like nervetti (boiled veal cartilage) or musetto (headcheese - good name for a band, I've always thought).
Bacari Revival
Twenty years ago, neighbourhood bacari were under threat, as the continuing exodus to the terra firma dried up the supply of red-nosed old men arguing over their cards in impenetrable dialect. These were the years when it looked as though Venice might really become a Flamboyant Gothic version of Disneyland, when the gulf between tourist Venice and the increasingly endangered population of real Venetians was at its widest.
But it was this gap, paradoxically, that generated the solution. Tuned-in tourists, tired of the starched, expense-account restaurants that their hotel porters sent them to in return for a small commission, were aided in their search for an alternative by the city's large and hungry army of students, who are far too politically correct to consider McDonalds.
Bacari, in other words, became trendy - and they rose to the challenge by offering more tables to sit down at, more hot dishes to make a meal of, and - above all - by changing their opening hours to fall in with international standards. Only a few unreconstructed bacari continue to confound the unprepared by closing for lunch (at around 1.30pm) and dinner (after nine).
Not all went as far as Da Fiore, which rose from its humble elbow-raising origins to become Venice's top restaurant; many more - like Al Mascaron (now a little over the hill) or the Ca d'Oro (aka 'Alla Vedova') took on the restaurant mantle without sacrificing the simple recipes, service and prices that brought people here in the first place. So successful has the formula been that a number of apparently age-old bacari - with the regulation wooden beams and copper pots overhead - are actually recent arrivals (Sora al Ponte, by the fish market, and the Cantina Vecia Carbonera, on the Strada Nuova, are two examples).
Contagious Authentic Approach
The downhome, authentic approach soon filtered up into bona fide restaurants; elaborate sauces and pan-Italian cuisine were abandoned in favour of the full Venetian seafood experience, which reached its acme at the Corte Sconta - a trattoria in the eastern reaches of Castello, near the Arsenale, whose owner prides himself in more or less equal measure on his far-left politics and his ability to obtain the freshest sea creatures and to present them in recipes - especially antipasto recipes - that take away as little of this freshness as possible. Others soon followed suit, and the trend even filtered up - slowly, like a vaporetto emerging from the fog - to the hotel restaurants that line the Grand Canal.
In the last couple of years, the simple seafood formula has itself become a little tired; a recent restaurant arrival like Alle Testiere varies it with spices and sweet-and-sour flavours, while the Bancogiro - the newest of Venice's wine-and-food operations - offers a range of cheap, creative dishes that bear little relation to the cuttlefish and spider-crab school of Venetian cooking. The careful selection of bottles on offer in both of these places also demonstrates the new attention to wine that has arisen to meet an increasingly well-informed class of customer.
One of the other enjoyable aspects of being a foodie on the lagoon is the fact that the club really is rather small, and everybody knows everybody else. Local eaters and drinkers know that Andrea, now at Bancogiro, used to work at Bentigodi, or that Sandro of Da Sandro (not to be confused with Da Sergio, where, for the record, you can get one of the cheapest meals in Venice) recently moved to new premises - also called Da Sandro - in Calle Lunga San Barnabà, because he was fed up of cooking fish and wanted to explore the less visible but equally venerable Venetian stock of meat and game recipes. This fishbowl effect also helps to foment rivalries and - in contrast with the complacent local hotel scene - to spur chefs and owners to greater heights.
Looking for tips on the finest places to eat in the city? See Lee Marshall's selection of the best restaurants in Venice or read more travel writing about Italy. Alternatively, check out all our luxury hotels in Venice.
This article originally appeared in Conde Nast Traveller (UK)