What to eat in Venice
Venice eats standing up and in small doses: cicheti on the counter of a bacaro with a small glass of wine, sweet-sour sardines, whipped stockfish on white polenta. The rest comes from the lagoon, on brutally short seasons: soft-shell crabs and baby artichokes last only weeks.
Venetian cooking is the cooking of a port that controlled the spice routes for centuries. Pepper, cinnamon, cloves, raisins and pine nuts turn up in savoury dishes without apology, producing a sweet-and-sour register that barely exists elsewhere in Italy: sarde in saor is fried fish under vinegared onion and raisins, and tastes closer to the eastern Mediterranean than to the Veneto. Sugar, which reached this city before most others, left marks in unexpected places too.
The other half comes from shallow water. The lagoon is not open sea: it yields small, seasonal creatures (crabs, grey shrimp, gobies, cuttlefish) plus vegetables grown on the sandy islands of Sant'Erasmo and Vignole. Hence the logic of very short seasons. Soft-shell crabs exist only in the weeks when the crab sheds its shell; castraure only until the artichoke has put out its side buds. Arrive outside the window and you are eating a different city.
Then there is the shape of the meal, which is unlike anywhere else in Italy. A bacaro, the local wine bar, does not serve a first course, a second course and a side. It serves cicheti, small things sitting on the counter, and an ombra, a small glass of wine. You eat standing, you pay little, you move on. The giro de ombre is not an organised tour: it is what Venetians do at six in the evening around Rialto, Cannaregio and Santa Margherita.
The dishes of Venice
Cicheti and ombre
The bites eaten standing at the counter: half a boiled egg with an anchovy, a crostino of whipped stockfish, a fried meatball, radicchio with sopressa salami, boiled baby octopus, sardines in saor. They cost roughly 1.50 to 3 euro each and are washed down with an ombra, a small glass of wine named after the shade of the St Mark's bell tower, where wine sellers used to shift their stalls through the day to stay cool. Cantina Do Mori in San Polo has been pouring since 1462.
Sarde in saor
Sardines floured and fried, then buried under white onions stewed slowly in vinegar and left to sit for at least a day before eating. Saor started as shipboard preservation: vinegar and onion kept fish edible for days without ice, and the onion supplied vitamin C against scurvy. The raisins and pine nuts are a later, wealthier addition, and plenty of bacari leave them out.
Baccala mantecato
Venetians call it baccala, but it is stockfish: cod air-dried on racks in the Lofoten islands, not salted. It is soaked for days, poached, boned by hand and beaten with a thin stream of olive oil until it turns into a pale, airy cream, in the strict version with no milk, no garlic and no cream. It arrived after captain Pietro Querini was shipwrecked at Rost in 1432, and Norway has supplied the city ever since. Serve it on grilled white polenta.
Moeche
Green lagoon crabs caught in the few weeks of moulting, after the old shell is shed and before the new one hardens. The moecanti of Burano, Giudecca and Chioggia keep them in submerged baskets and check them individually twice a day, because the usable window lasts hours. They go live into beaten egg, are deep-fried whole and eaten whole, shell included. They are expensive; if a menu offers them in June or January, they were frozen.
Castraure of Sant'Erasmo
The first violet artichoke on the plant, the apical bud, which is cut, or castrated, so the side buds beneath it can grow. The season runs two or three weeks between April and May, the crop comes only from Sant'Erasmo and a couple of neighbouring islands, and it is a Slow Food Presidium. Eat them raw, sliced thin with oil, lemon and cheese shavings, or briefly pan-fried with garlic and parsley.
Bigoli in salsa
Bigoli are thick, rough spaghetti pushed through a hand-cranked press called a bigolaro; the Venetian version is often dark, made with soft or wholemeal wheat. The sauce is nothing but onions stewed down slowly with salted sardines or anchovies melted into oil: no tomato, no cheese. It is a fasting dish, eaten by the calendar on Christmas Eve, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
Risi e bisi
Neither a risotto nor a soup but something in between, served loose enough to ripple and eaten with a spoon. It uses Vialone Nano rice, young peas, and a broth made by boiling the empty pods, with pancetta and parsley. It was carried to the Doge on 25 April, the feast of St Mark, and the peas had to come from the first mainland harvest: outside that window the dish loses its point.
Fegato alla veneziana
Calf's liver sliced very thin and dropped for seconds onto a bed of white onions that have stewed for at least half an hour, finished with a splash of vinegar or white wine. The ratio is the whole trick: a lot of onion, not much liver, and the shortest possible cooking, or it turns rubbery. It comes with white polenta, made in Venice from Biancoperla maize and much gentler than the yellow kind.
Risotto de go and cuttlefish in ink
The go is a lagoon goby, an unattractive fish landed mostly at Burano: it is boiled, pushed through a sieve and turned into a dense broth for the rice, traditionally served with the fish head laid on top. Cuttlefish in its own ink is the other dark dish of the city, stewed into a black sauce and eaten with white polenta. Both are lagoon cooking rather than open-sea cooking.
Schie with white polenta
Schie are tiny grey shrimp, about two centimetres long, that live in the muddy shallows and stay grey-brown rather than turning pink when cooked. They are boiled or tossed with garlic and parsley and spooned onto soft white polenta. You eat them whole, shells and all, and they are one of the cicheti that separate a working bacaro from a bar that buys everything frozen.
Local products
Venice's raw material is the lagoon itself: moeche and masanete (the female crabs carrying eggs), grey shrimp, gobies, cuttlefish, baby octopus, mantis shrimp. The island gardens supply the violet artichoke of Sant'Erasmo and its castraure; just south, Chioggia radicchio IGP, and from November the late radicchio of Treviso. For risotto the benchmark grain is Vialone Nano Veronese IGP, which holds the wave-like texture; for polenta it is Biancoperla maize, a Slow Food Presidium, whose white flour is the one served with fish.
From the mainland come white asparagus from Bassano DOP, hill-grown peas for risi e bisi, sopressa salami and Monte Veronese cheese. A bacaro's short wine list covers most needs: Prosecco from Valdobbiadene to start, Soave and Custoza with fish, Raboso and Refosco with meat cicheti, and the lagoon's own wine, made from Dorona, a native white grape brought back from near-extinction in the walled gardens of Mazzorbo. The Venetian spritz is made with Select, created in the city in 1920, and comes with an olive rather than an orange slice.
Sweets and pastries
Venetian biscuits are built for dipping. Baicoli are paper-thin twice-baked slices, designed to keep on a boat and to be dunked into zabaione or coffee. Esse and bussolai buranelli, yellow with egg yolk and butter, come from Burano, where island bakeries still sell them loose by the kilo. Zaleti (from zalo, dialect for yellow) are made with maize flour and raisins soaked in grappa.
The calendar dictates the rest. Carnival brings fritole, fried yeasted balls with raisins and pine nuts or filled with custard and zabaione; the fritoleri were a recognised guild with fixed pitches around the city, handed down from father to son. Alongside them come galani, thin fried pastry ribbons under a snowfall of sugar. On 21 November, for the Madonna della Salute, the city eats castradina, a smoked mutton soup rather than a sweet, but a marker of the year all the same. The pastry addresses are Tonolo near San Pantalon, Rosa Salva, trading since 1879, and Dal Mas near the station.
Where to try them
Everything starts at Rialto: the Pescheria fish market under its neo-Gothic loggia, built in 1907, and next to it the Erberia, where island and mainland vegetables land. The fish market works early in the morning and closes on Sunday and Monday; a marble plaque on the pillars still lists the minimum legal size for each species, as it has for centuries. In the surrounding lanes there are real shops left: Drogheria Mascari on Ruga dei Spezieri for spices and wine, and the old cheesemongers a few metres away.
Start your bacari around Rialto (Cantina Do Mori since 1462, All'Arco down a side lane, Do Spade) then move to Cannaregio along the Misericordia and Ormesini canals, and to San Trovaso in Dorsoduro, where Cantine del Vino gia Schiavi invent crostini on the spot. Osteria alla Vedova in Cannaregio is known for a single fried meatball ordered at the counter.
Escaping the tourist belt is a matter of walking: Via Garibaldi in Castello, the Arsenale district, the Giudecca, the islands. Burano and Pellestrina have family trattorie cooking lagoon fish, and on Sant'Erasmo you can buy artichokes from the growers. The rule in the centre is dull but reliable: no fixed-price tourist menu, no photographs of the dishes, and frozen items must be flagged on the menu, as Italian law requires.
When to go
There are two real windows: spring and late autumn. Between April and May you can have moeche, castraure and the first peas for risi e bisi at the same time, the latter eaten everywhere on 25 April, the feast of St Mark and of the city. Moeche return in October and November with the second moult.
Summer is the season of cold cicheti and sarde in saor, eaten on boats on the third Sunday of July while waiting for the Redentore fireworks. February brings Carnival and trays of fritole in every window. On 21 November the city crosses a votive pontoon bridge over the Grand Canal for the Madonna della Salute and eats castradina, which is available only in those few days. From late September to December high water can complicate a day: check the tide forecast the evening before and bring boots rather than an umbrella.
Food tours and classes here
Frequently asked questions
What food is Venice known for?
Lagoon seafood and vegetables served in small portions. The defining dishes are counter-top cicheti, sarde in saor (sweet-sour sardines), baccala mantecato on white polenta, bigoli in salsa, calf's liver with onions, and lagoon risottos. In season, add moeche and castraure, both of which last only a few weeks a year.
What are cicheti and how much do they cost?
They are small bites laid out on the counter of a bacaro, the Venetian equivalent of tapas: crostini, meatballs, half eggs, vegetables, seafood. Expect 1.50 to 3 euro each, plus one to three euro for a small glass of wine. You eat standing, and you settle up at the end by telling the bar what you had.
Is Venetian baccala mantecato made from salt cod?
No. It is made from stockfish: cod dried in the open air, without salt. Venice and the wider Veneto have always called stockfish baccala out of habit, which confuses everyone arriving from outside the region. The same applies to baccala alla vicentina, which is also stockfish.
How do I avoid tourist restaurants in Venice?
Move off the Rialto-San Marco-Accademia corridor and look in Cannaregio, in Castello towards Via Garibaldi, in Dorsoduro around San Trovaso, and on the Giudecca. Warning signs: a fixed-price tourist menu, photographs of dishes, staff inviting you in from the street, and spaghetti alle vongole at eight euro all year round. Italian law requires frozen items to be marked on the menu; a three-page seafood list with no such marks tells you something.