The Venetian kitchen in Venice

In a nutshell: lagoon seafood, the spice trade, cicchetti and the sweet-and-sour soul of the Serenissima - this is how and what to eat in Venice. Get the addresses from where to eat, and start at the Rialto Market for the raw ingredients.

Of all the regional kitchens of Italy, Venice's leans hardest on the fruits of the lagoon - fish and shellfish - together with risotto and polenta, and the city remains one of Europe's great eating destinations. A few ground rules apply: most restaurants close their kitchens between lunch and dinner and reopen around 19:00, the best tables go to those who reserve ahead, and the bill carries a Venice premium - expect to pay noticeably more than on the mainland for the privilege of eating in one of the world's most beautiful cities.

Venice is the symbol city of the Veneto for gastronomy as much as for art and culture. Venetian cooking has rustic origins - the food of fishermen and sailors - but the trade with the Middle and Far East in the times of republican splendor enriched and varied its repertoire enormously. When Byzantium fell, the Republic of Venice took its place as the gateway to the East: while the rest of Europe used spices mostly to preserve food, Venetian cooking adopted the alimentary principles of the Levant, made them its own and created new dishes. The galleons of the Serenissima returned from their long voyages loaded with salt, pepper, ginger, turmeric, fresh and candied nutmeg, galanga from India and even saffron from faraway China - spices unknown at the time, which fired the imagination of local cooks and gave birth to a culinary art unique of its kind. For centuries Venice was the mediator of the universe, the world market of everything sellable, and it was in the spice trade that it conquered its monopoly, profiting from the Western market's craze for the Orient. It also became, almost immediately, the capital of sugar import for all Europe; olive oil arrived from Crete, Corfu, Zante and Cephalonia, from the Asian coasts, from Tunisia and Dalmatia, and was then exported westward. During the Festa della Sensa, besides celebrating itself with the ceremony of the marriage to the sea, the government of the Serenissima filled Piazza San Marco with a great market-exhibition of the finest products of the Orient, drawing visitors from every country.

Venetian cooking blended the flavors of the East far more readily than the heavy cooking of the Padanian plain. A great influence came from the Armenians, who taught the Venetians to cook rice pilaff, to cultivate spinach, aubergines and apples, and above all to combine flavors and perfumes into a balanced, refined amalgam. Venice always stayed open to other cultures, letting different ethnic groups and communities live side by side - Germans, Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese and above all Jews, who regularly ate in the taverns and spread new habits and tastes: a great use of fruit and vegetables, and even different ways of cooking, such as frying the fish for saor only in oil, because other fats solidify by the next day, or stewing meat and vegetables in a covered pot. The soft ambivalence of Oriental aromas also shows in the sweet-and-sour (agrodolce) that still dominates Venetian and Veneto cooking: aromas and spices sweeter and warmer than pungent, often accompanied by dried fruit, woven together with onion - you find it in the baccalà and in the sauces of white meats.

Bacari, cicchetti and the aperitivo

The place of choice for tasting Venetian cooking - beyond the countless trattorias - is the bacaro: a small bar, decidedly rustic and with an old-world flavor, where you stand in front of the counter and taste the typical cicchetti (antipasti) one after another when you don't have time to sit down. Cicchetti, the Venetian cousin of Spanish tapas, began as fast food for working people, and the spread is at its best on weekdays - at lunch or for an early dinner - when the bars are full of locals rather than visitors.

The typical Venetian aperitif is officially the spritz: sparkling water, white wine, ice, a zest of lemon and/or an olive, and - as you choose - bitter, select, Aperol or Cynar. The drink is common across the lands of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy (1867–1918): Hungary (where it is called frocs), Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and even Romania. The story goes that the Austrian occupiers, finding the Veneto wine too strong, long tried to drink it diluted with water; the Venetians, to give it a bit of tone, added the liqueur, and so was born the drink the Austrians called spritz - injection. Order it con Campari for a bitter edge or con Aperol for a sweeter one, and between six and eight in the evening the city's bars fill with its rosy glow; a garnish of olive or fruit on a skewer completes the glass. It is drunk from five in the afternoon onward, though some take one in the morning before lunch; being the result of a mixture, it is undoubtedly a rather strong aperitif - don't overdo it!

Cicchetti, from crostini to fiori di zucca

Cicchetti is the city's signature way of eating: snack-sized bites made for wine. The most common today are crostini - small slices of baguette under everything from whipped salt cod (baccalà mantecato) to sardines in the sweet-and-sour style called sarde in saor, and on to richer inventions like pear mostarda spread beside silky lardo. Beyond the open-faced sandwiches, bacari spread meatballs (polpette) with a kick, squash blossoms (fiori di zucca) packed with ricotta, wild-boar salami, mortadella-stuffed mini rolls, anchovy-topped boiled eggs, and pancetta-wrapped lagoon shrimp with white asparagus from Bassano.

• ✦Prices start at about €1.20 for the smallest filled panini; most cicchetti land between €2.50 and €3.50
• ✦Tradition says you eat standing - either standing at the bar or out on the fondamenta before the door
• ✦The spread is best at weekday lunch or around 18:00, when the bars fill with locals

The cicchetti strip by the Rialto Market

A hundred-yard stretch starting two blocks inland from the Rialto Market, along Sotoportego dei Do Mori and Calle de le Do Spade, has long been the city's favourite circuit for bar snacks and wine by the glass. The four places here serve food all day but are at their best around noon. The classic routine: ask for an ombra - a €1 glass of house wine - or spend about €3 on a finer pour, and pick your cicchetti at roughly €2 apiece. Later in the evening the lane gets unworkably crowded, so come early.

• ✦Bar all'Arco - a bustling single room devoted mostly to crostini, small open-faced sandwiches (Thu-Tue 10:00-14:30, closed Wed; Campo San Polo 436).
• ✦Cantina Do Mori - a forest of little toothpick snacks plus francobolli, spicy miniature sandwiches soaked in mayonnaise nicknamed "stamps"; famously gruff service is part of the act, and the bill can climb fast (Mon-Sat 8:00-19:30, closed Sun; Calle Do Mori, San Polo 430).
• ✦Osteria ai Storti - more of a sit-down spot, with tables inside and out and a photo of the Rialto Market from 1909 on the wall; the €2 fried bites are a speciality (around the corner from Cantina Do Mori on Calle San Matio, San Polo 819).
• ✦Cantina Do Spade - run by Francesco, who boards the day's mostly deep-fried cicchetti and wines, and who also serves proper sit-down meals (30 yards along Calle de le Do Spade, San Polo 860, +39 041 521 0583).

The etiquette of the crawl is simple. Find a place that is more bar than restaurant and make sure the cicchetti are out on display; order an aperitivo or a glass of wine, then point at what tempts you, one or two pieces at a time. Seats are generally for customers ordering from the menu - avoid the tables with tablecloths - and you settle the bill when you are ready to leave. If you have crawled enough, most of the recommended bars make a fine one-stop, sit-down dinner. Veggie plates run about €3, a set price per piece is common (often €1.50), and an assorted mixed plate - un piatto classico di cicchetti misti - costs from €8 depending on your appetite. Bread sticks (grissini) are free for the asking.

• ✦Around Campo San Bartolomeo, three tiny bars cluster within yards of each other: Osteria I Rusteghi, a serious wine bar pairing fine dishes with fine wines (Corte dei Tentor 5513); modern Bar SEPA, popular with a young crowd, standing room only around the barrels (Calle della Bissa); and old-school Bacarando, with clearly priced little dishes at the counter and two floors of table seating (Corte dell'Orso 5495).
• ✦Al Mercà Bar, a few steps off the canal by the market, has no interior at all - you stand in the little square with €2 mini-sandwiches and quality wine by the glass (Mon-Sat 10:00-14:30 & 18:00-21:00, closed Sun; Campo Bella Vienna, San Polo 213).
• ✦Enoteca Cantine del Vino Già Schiavi, near the Accademia, is a much-loved wine shop whose bar serves cheap cicchetti, sandwiches and wine to a crowd spilling onto the pavement (Mon-Sat 8:30-20:30; Fondamenta Nani 992).
• ✦On Campo Santa Margarita, hole-in-the-wall cicchetti bars ring the square, serving drinks and plates to local eaters with a contagious love of life.

Polenta, the other bread

Venetians joke that if there is no bread, there is still polenta - the cornmeal cake is their second staple. Ground from white or yellow maize, it arrives either as a grilled slice of set polenta or soft and steaming. Solid slabs show up among the cicchetti, usually capped with a spoonful of baccalà mantecato, while the soft version is the natural companion to strongly flavoured standbys like cuttlefish in its own ink, fegato alla veneziana or rustic pork sausages. One beloved combination, polenta e schie, piles the soft polenta with the lagoon's tiny shrimps.

From the sea to the table

The lagoon and the Adriatic set the menu: mackerel (sgombro), sea bass (branzino), sea bream (orata) and eels (bisati) all turn up regularly, and the small goby known as gò is the hero of Burano's famous risotto, cooked with Vialone Nano rice, butter and parmigiano reggiano, finished with parsley. Shellfish favourites include cuttlefish (seppie), mantis shrimp (canoce), prawns (scampi) and baby octopus (moscardini), the last two often served alla busara, simmered with garlic, chilli and cherry tomatoes in a deep, glossy sauce. In spring and again in autumn, watch for moeche, the soft-shell crabs of the lagoon, coated in a light egg batter, fried until crisp and finished with lemon - and in spring the tender violeti di Sant'Erasmo, tiny purple artichokes, are a prized side.

The classic antipasti

• ✦Baccalà mantecato - the traditional cicchetto of every Venetian osteria, normally served on crostini or grilled white polenta. The cod is boiled at length, cut into flakes and whipped with a metal whisk while a thin thread of oil runs in, so that it mounts like a mousse; many beat it with a wooden spoon or an electric blender and use white pepper instead of black, and in Jewish cooking - an old Venetian habit too - it is whipped with milk.
• ✦Sarde in saor - the great classic of the saor, the old preservation method for the fish that was caught in abundance in certain seasons: a sauce of vinegar and other ingredients laid over cooked, roasted or fried fish - and also over vegetables and meat. The simplest fish saor fries the fish soft and covers it with a marinade of plenty of pepper and cinnamon, onion and vinegar, with garlic, oil, parsley and a teaspoon of sugar. Sardines are the fish most used for saor in every home and osteria, uninterrupted for centuries; sole too is often marinated in saor, especially for the Festa del Redentore, together with snails in garlic and oil, roast duck and fasioi (beans). Still widely used in Jewish cuisine, saor is the ideal dish for Saturday.
• ✦Bovoleti, calamaretti and canestrei fritti - sea snails in garlic and oil (to be noisily sucked from the shell), baby squid and other fried molluscs; it is practically impossible not to find them among the cicchetti.
• ✦Antipasto di mare - a chilled, marinated mix of fish and shellfish, the classic light way to open a meal.
• ✦Asiago - cow's-milk cheese, young and creamy (mezzano) or aged and pungent (stravecchio).

First courses

• ✦Bigoli in salsa - rough, coarse spaghetti of fresh pasta, sometimes whole-wheat, sometimes of durum wheat, dressed with a paste of sardines and onion. The sauce, in which onion and sardines are left to wilt until they form an amalgam in which the two ingredients are barely distinguishable, is considered in the Veneto, by antonomasia, the sauce that also flavors many fish, vegetable and leftover-meat dishes; across the whole region it has been and still is the most common dish on days of abstinence and fasting.
• ✦Risi e bisi - rice with peas, the Doge's dish on the day of San Marco; its origin is still a matter of dispute between the Veneto provinces, Venice and Padua in particular. At least ten versions exist, from the brothy one with the pods to the one flavored with goose.
• ✦Risi e fegatini - rice with chicken livers, the soup of feast days and wedding lunches.
• ✦Risotto with cuttlefish - the cuttlefish are usually cooked separately with onion and garlic and added halfway through the cooking together with their ink (the version with scampi is excellent too). The Venetians were the ones who turned rice from a nobleman's food into a popular dish: the Veneto counts some forty rice preparations, combined with the most disparate ingredients - meat, fish and above all vegetables such as zucchini, cabbage, asparagus, peas and cauliflower. Rice, like most of the ingredients of this kitchen, arrived in the Veneto from the Arab world through Venetian trade with the East, and is cultivated mainly in the province of Verona, every province trying to give its recipes a touch of originality.
• ✦Pasta alla buzzara - pasta in a rich seafood-and-tomato sauce, generally with shrimp.
• ✦Spaghetti alle vongole - pasta with clams, a lagoon staple.
• ✦Pasta e fagioli - the bean-and-pasta soup of the Veneto.
• ✦Risotto al nero - black risotto turned dark with squid ink.

Second courses, fish and sweets

• ✦Fegato alla veneziana - sliced calf's liver cooked in a soffritto of oil, onions, butter and parsley; probably the best known of the Serenissima's specialties, now enjoyed in almost every part of the world, and a dish it is almost obligatory to taste during a visit to Venice. Variants include liver in saor and liver with a sweet-and-sour lemon sauce.
• ✦Baccalà alla veneziana - in the Veneto there are many ways to cook salt cod, at least one for every great city: the Venetian way cooks it with onion and olive oil and finishes it with cinnamon, raisins and pine nuts, milk and grated grana, served naturally with steaming polenta. The typical sauce for fish dishes is made of parsley and garlic chopped in olive oil and perfumed with freshly ground pepper.
• ✦Polenta e osei - the famous dish that unites the Venetians' love of polenta with their taste for meat: polenta served with small birds browned slowly over a low fire, flavored with lard, sage and olive oil. Polenta is considered by the Venetians a true bread: before maize arrived it was already made with a base of buckwheat mixed with millet and beans, and toward the middle of the sixteenth century the Venetians imported granturco to improve it - called turco by the people, who considered it a foreign, hence Turkish, cereal.
• ✦The fish of the high Adriatic - sardines, turbot, moscardini and grey mullet, together with seppie in tegame (cuttlefish in a pan) and eels in umido, all the catch of the Adriatic. The Venetian frying, conducted with expert technique, is famous internationally: the classic fritto misto is made with shrimp, squid and small sole.
• ✦Granseola - the great spider crab, thrown into boiling water and, at the end of cooking, dressed with olive oil, salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon: a prized antipasto on the tables of the Serenissima. Also much appreciated is the pasticcio di pesce, lasagne baked with fish and shellfish. Crabs, baby octopus, scallops, moeche and cuttlefish are served with refined solutions that reflect the particular sensibility and elegance of the Venetians.
• ✦Branzino, orata and rombo - sea bass, sea bream and turbot, typically grilled or oven-cooked and served whole; sogliola (sole) comes poached or oven-roasted, rospo (frogfish) grilled, and vitello di mare - "sea veal" - is firm, mild and grilled like swordfish. The weirder the seafood, the more local it is.
• ✦Moleche col pien - soft-shell crabs, fried crisp, a seasonal delicacy of the lagoon.
• ✦Nero di seppia - cuttlefish served in its own ink, often over spaghetti; alongside cozze (mussels steamed in an herb broth with tomato), vongole (clams steamed with herbs and wine) and a full zuppa di pesce (seafood stew).
• ✦Zaeti and buranei - the zaeti are biscuits made with half yellow flour and half white, eggs, pine nuts and raisins, very common in Venice along with the buranei, a typical biscuit with a characteristic S shape; both are to be eaten with a good sweet wine, such as fragolino.
• ✦Fritole - tiny doughnuts inseparable from Carnevale.
• ✦Pinza - a rustic cake of cornmeal and wheat flour packed with dried fruit, baked for Epiphany (6 January).
• ✦Tiramisù - ladyfingers soaked in coffee and Marsala, layered with mascarpone and bitter chocolate.
• ✦Bisse, bussola and croccante - seahorse-shaped cookies, ring-shaped cookies made for Easter, and a toasted-almond confection similar to peanut brittle.

Vegetarians and vegans

A city of seafood can still feed herbivores well. Pasta and risotto primi lean on local vegetables - asparagus, radicchio, artichokes and bruscandoli, the wild hop shoots of spring - and contorni (side dishes) of grilled vegetables are everywhere. Cicchetti counters feature vinegar-marinated vegetables alongside Veneto cheeses, meat-free pizza is easy to find, and gelaterie do dairy-free sorbetto plus soy-milk gelato. Dedicated vegan restaurants are rare, but calling ahead usually lets kitchens adapt a dish or two.

Markets and food festivals

Shopping like a local starts among the stalls of the Rialto Market for lagoon seafood and island-grown produce, but other stalls and floating barges extend the choice across the city: the Lido's weekly Tuesday gathering, Mercato Settimanale del Lido, ranks close behind; on Giudecca a Thursday-morning market sells organic vegetables grown in the prison's own vegetable garden; and produce barges moor along the Rio di Sant'Anna where Via Garibaldi runs out in Castello and next to the Campo San Barnaba square in Dorsoduro, close to Ponte dei Pugni.

• ✦Carnevale (January–February) - the pre-Lenten festivities come with fritole, doughnuts packed with raisins soaked in rum (official site)
• ✦Wine in Venice (January–February) - several days of tastings, talks and events on sustainable winemaking in a grand hall in Cannaregio
• ✦Vinitaly (April) - Italy's biggest wine and spirits fair, held in Verona (vinitaly.com)
• ✦Festa del Mosto (October) - Sant'Erasmo marks the wine harvest in style - a parade, live bands and unstinting pours (santerasmo.org)
• ✦Venice Cocktail Week (September–October) - the city's bars roll out special drinks menus, citywide deals and masterclasses
• ✦Festa della Madonna della Salute (21 November) - Venetians thank the plague-saving Virgin with castradina, a mutton stew (Basilica della Salute)

Wines and cocktails

For drinking well by the glass, seek out the city's specialist wine bars - Vino Vero, Salvmeria, Osteria Al Cicheto and Malvasia all'Adriatico Mar among them - where the lists showcase exciting, little-known, low-intervention bottles. The local move is to ask for something interesting - qualcosa di particolare, as the locals say - then trust the pourer's choice.

• ✦Ribolla Gialla - a substantial white that only improves with bottle age
• ✦Lugana - a structured, minerally white built on the Trebbiano vine
• ✦Valpolicella Ripasso - the ripasso method's richer red
• ✦Recioto della Valpolicella - the sweet, late-harvest DOCG red
• ✦Amarone - deep, intricate and costly, sometimes called the Titian among wines
• ✦Raboso - tannin-heavy, one of Italy's great mature reds
• ✦Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso - brooding, intense and rare

Italian wine law stamps quality through the DOC and the top-tier DOCG, but many small Veneto producers prefer the looser IGT label, which guarantees grapes true to the region yet leaves producers freedom to try unconventional blends and techniques like natural-yeast fermentation.

The most famous local cocktail is the Bellini, invented at Harry's Bar near St Mark's Square. A good last drink is fragolino, the sweet local wine, which often arrives with a little biscuit for dipping. By the glass, the house keg wine costs about €1 (roughly €4 per liter), a small beer (birrino) the same, while the finer bottles uncorked for the day - vin bon, Venetian for fine wine - run from €2 to €6.

The coffee ritual

Coffee reached Venice early - the city counts among Europe's pioneering coffee capitals, a habit carried in from the Ottoman world - and the rituals survive. Most locals knock back their espresso upright at the counter, which is quicker and cheaper than table service, and the macchiatone, espresso topped with a generous splash of hot milk, is a favourite order. After 11:00, cappuccino all but disappears from Venetian counters, and it never accompanies a meal. Among the city's own roasters are Il Caffè del Doge, Caffè Girani and Torrefazione Cannaregio.

The Bellini may have been born at Harry's Bar, but the classic version lives on at Bar Longhi in the Gritti Palace, where it is built only in season, from fresh white-peach purée rather than anything canned. Meanwhile, a fresh crop of cocktail lounges - the Experimental Cocktail Club in Dorsoduro, the Library Bar inside Nolinski Venezia and the Arts Bar of the St Regis Venice - is rethinking the mixed drink with location-specific inventions.

Eating well: practical tips

• ✦Kitchens close between lunch and dinner and reopen around 19:00; a restaurant fully booked for the evening may still take walk-in diners willing to eat early and quickly.
• ✦Reserve ahead for anywhere you have set your heart on - the best values are no secret, and without a booking you may only get lucky at opening time.
• ✦Eat fish for freshness: most seafood dishes are built from the catch of the day.
• ✦Eat late: a place that feels touristy at 19:00 can be filled with locals by 21:00. Eat early for fewer crowds; eat later for more Italians.
• ✦Walk past menus printed in three languages and laminated photographs of food - a reliable sign of a tourist trap.
• ✦Venetian fish are generally smaller than Atlantic salmon and trout - think sardines and anchovies - so keep an open mind and order the local catch.

Eating affordably in Venice means pizza, bars and cafés, self-service tavola calda counters and picnics. Sandwiches are sold fast and cheaply at bars everywhere: panini on rustic bread, piadini flatbread wraps, and tramezzini - crustless white sandwiches served cold, filled with egg, tuna or shrimp with mayonnaise. Takeout pizza is a bargain: family-size rounds (about 20 inches across) go for €8-15 and 12-inch "normal" pizzas for €4-8, with slices from about €2 to €4.50 depending on the neighbourhood - prices climb steeply as you near the Rialto and St Mark's Square. A €10 pizza with a beer or a carafe of house wine at a canalside table is one of the city's great value meals.

Gelato, sweets and picnic shopping

Venice is not famous for the quality of its gelato, but you will still find good gelaterie in every neighbourhood: a single scoop costs about €2 and each extra scoop €1. The words artigianale or produzione propria mean the shop makes its own - although sometimes from a powder or paste base - so avoid brightly coloured gelato or shops with overflowing tubs. Favourites include gourmet Gelatoteca Suso near Campo San Bartolomeo (flavours served in edible bowls), Cioccolateria VizioVirtù across from Osteria al Portego near Campo Santa Maria Formosa, and Gelateria Il Doge on Campo Santa Margarita.

For a picnic, gather your ingredients in the morning at the produce market that sprawls for a few blocks north of the Rialto Bridge (best Mon-Sat 8:00-13:00, liveliest in the morning; the neighbouring fish market is closed Sun-Mon). Picnicking on or near St Mark's Square is forbidden except in the Giardinetti Reali park by the San Marco vaporetto docks; elsewhere the main threat is the pigeons and the aggressive seagulls that mob them. Handy supermarkets include the Co-op on the corner of Salizada San Lio and Calle del Mondo Novo near St Mark's, the large Co-op at Piazzale Roma, and smaller branches on Campo San Felice and Riva del Carbon.