Cook like a local: Venice
Lose yourself among the city’s picturesque alleyways and canals and you’ll be rewarded with lardo and chestnut honey-topped crostini, buttery risotto and sweet local shrimp
Skye McAlpine reveals this Italian city’s culinary highlights, including chestnut honey and lardo-topped crostini, buttery risotto and seafood antipasti
Food isn’t often the prime reason why people visit Venice; mostly they come for the grand palazzos, the Titians, the Tintorettos and the dreamy canal views – all of which are, of course, worth travelling for. But Venetian cuisine, with its succulent seafood and its heady, exotic spices, is one of Italy’s best-kept secrets. It’s also where you’ll find the true spirit of the city.
Amble off the beaten track, away from the main piazzas and the vendors peddling stale panini to unwitting tourists. Make your way into the quieter parts of town, where laundry hangs out to dry on lines stretching from window to window across the alleyways, and children play hopscotch in the campo. There you will find the really good food – unpretentious, far from glamorous, but seasonal, local and uniquely Venetian.
Stop in at a bar, or bacaro, for a spritz and a few small bites – what, in Venice, we call cicheti: a chunk or two of polenta paired with creamy baccalà (salt cod), a few crostini topped with lardo and chestnut honey or sweet, raw canoce (a quirky looking shrimp that is local to the lagoon) and grassy olive oil. Eat your breakfast at one of the many family-run pasticcerie dotted around town (have your freshly baked pastry and your coffee standing at the bar – it’s half the price of the table service, and what all the locals do). Explore the colourful fruit, vegetable and fish markets – every bit as picturesque as any Carpaccio painting. And, when you stop for lunch at a trattoria, bullishly ignore the menu; instead ask your waiter what to eat. Watch his face light up as he waxes lyrical about how they make their pasta sauce and what kind of fish they’ve got in the kitchen today, then ready yourself for the array of seafood antipasti, buttery risotto and sweets coming your way.