DINE LIKE A VENETIAN
Eat thrilling, filling and authentic food at a bacarò where the menus change day by day, hour by hour
EACH year, 20 million tourists visit Venice, Italy. The vast majority will pay too much for indifferent food eaten mostly in the company of other tourists. But there is one way to eat great Venetian food that is thrilling, filling and authentic. You will find it at a place where you are almost certain to rub and bend elbows with locals. Visit a bacarò.
Like Spain’s tapas bars, the bacarò serves infinitely varied, colourful small plates at prices even a budget traveller can afford. What makes the Venetian version unique is that the menu changes not only seasonally, but day by day and hour by hour.
Venetians call these small plates cicchetti (pronounced “chiket-tee”) – said to derive from the Latin ciccus, meaning “little” or “nothing”. The term embraces a broad range of dishes: polpette (fried meatballs), crostini (small open-faced sandwiches), panini (small sandwiches on crusty rolls), tramezzini (triangular white bread sandwiches) – and a scintillating array of pickled, baked, stuffed or sauced seafoods and vegetables.
You find cicchetti at a bacarò, but also at a botegòn, cantina, cicchetteria, oenoteca and osteria. And most likely at your neighbourhood bar.
Depending on whom you ask, bacarò comes from the Venetian word for “wine” or “a good bar,” or even from the ancient Roman god of wine, Bacchus.
Venetians eat cicchetti for breakfast, lunch, dinner and a midnight snack – mostly with their fingers. It is look-and-point food. And you do not need to wait to be seated to enjoy it.
Cicchetti are cheap. Six to eight make a meal, and the local wines are affordable, too. There are few ways more delectable or fun to get to know La Serenissima than by embarking on a bar crawl. Here are some of my favourites.
La Cantine del Vino già Schiavi
Alessandra De Respinis dreams of cicchetti. The septuagenarian owner of this hobbit-size bacarò in the artsy Dorsoduro District turns out these open-faced sandwiches by the hundreds. And she constantly invents new ones, like a cicchetto di castagna that plays the earthy sweetness of chestnut purée against the creamy funk of robiola cheese. Or her gamberi in saór – a shrimp riff on classic Venetian sweet and sour sardines piled on a slice of baguette.
“My customers would revolt if I stopped serving the tartare di tonno,” De Respinis said of her caper- and brandy-laced chopped tuna dusted with unsweetened cocoa powder.
That surprising combination won her a prize at a culinary contest in Mexico City. But she is no globe-
trotting chef. Day in, day out, you will find her behind the bar, white hair swept back, apron tied around her waist, with a gold fork pinned to her blouse – a gift from a customer in homage to her preferred utensil.
On a given day, Già Schiavi serves 25 wines – mostly from the Veneto – by the glass. I am partial to the white Orto di Venezia St Venissa, grown on the nearby island of Mazzorbo. Just do not expect to enjoy it sitting down. As De Respinis cautioned: Si consume, si bebe et si paga a piedi. (“You eat, drink and pay standing up.”)
All’arco
Mateo Pinto grates a fresh horseradish root so hard you can hear it rasp as the fiery shreds fall on bread slices topped with pink slices of ham and caramelised onions.
His father, Francesco Pinto, pours an ombra (“shadow,” literally – glass of wine in local parlance) for a Rialto fish merchant speaking Veneziano (a dialect quite distinct from Italian) with a woman rocking a child in a baby carriage.
If the Piazza San Marco is Europe’s drawing room (to quote Napoleon), All’arco is its neighbourhood tavern.
Situated in a maze of alleyways behind the Rialto fish market, this has been a bacarò for more than a century, explains All’arco’s founder, Francesco Pinto, who took over the one-room bar in 1996.
He started with a dozen cicchetti
– classic porchetta sandwiches, for example, and crostini smeared with Gorgonzola and anchovies.
Today, you will find more than 30 in an ever-changing repertory of hundreds. “We make our crostini by the minute, not by the hour,” Mateo explained. “The freshness must be apparent in each bite.”
You do not get much fresher than the season’s first canocchie, sweet mantis shrimp fresh from the lagoon, served atop tiny arugula leaves and tomatoes. In the winter, you will find heavier fare, such as veal stracotto (stew) – piled on a crusty roll,like some Venetian version of pulled pork.
All’arco takes its name from the ancient stone arch facing the bar – said to symbolise the matrimonial union of two neighbouring households centuries ago.
The bacarò fills quickly, so customers spill out to small tables lining the sidewalk. The ambience is joyous – the perfect embodiment of a Venetian institution designed not only to slake your thirst and assuage your appetite, but also to build your sense of community.
Cantina Do Spade
To embark on a cicchetti crawl in Venice without trying Do Spade’s
polpetta di spianata calabra would be like visiting San Marco and overlooking the basilica. It is a meatball, but, oh, what a meatball: fiery Calabrian sausage mashed with smoked provoletta cheese and potatoes, and lightly breaded and fried. “We wanted to open a
cicchetteria that serves more than open-faced sandwiches,” explained Francesco Munarini, a former bank executive who opened Do Spade a decade ago with his wife, Pilar, and sister, Giovanna.
Inspired by the Rialto fish market nearby, the Munarini family decided to specialise in seafood seasoned with the big-flavoured spices that made the fortunes of Venetian traders for centuries.
I downed calamari ripieni (tender squid stuffed with olives and breadcrumbs), fiori de zucca farciti con baccalà mantecato (fried squash flowers filled with creamed codfish),
moscardini in umido (stewed baby octopus), la buzara (scampi in gingerand pepper-piqued tomato sauce) and what may be the best sarde in
saór in Venice.
Osteria Bancogiro
Housed in a former vegetable depot, Bancogiro is part wine bar and part osteria (restaurant). There is outdoor seating on a wide terrace situated directly on the Grand Canal. If the water were any closer, you would have to dine in a gondola.
Here, too, seafood figures prominently, from a luscious crostino
of piovra, lardo e melanzana (octopus, lardo and eggplant) to Bancogiro’s signature ricotta salata con gamberi
al curry (salted ricotta and curried shrimp over a rectangle of creamy squid ink polenta) – the latter popular with the gluten-free crowd.
If salume is your thing, you will find artisanal mortadella from Bologna dotted with toasted sweet pistachios, and crostini carpeted with lacy coppa (shoulder ham) cured with Amarone wine.
On any given day, Bancogiro offers 17 wines by the glass. After your meal, follow the signs to the nearby Traghetto San Sofia for a ride on what I call a poor man’s gondola. Two euros (R32) gets you on an oversize gondola across the Grand Canal in the company of Venetians with their market bags. Gentlemen take note: it is considered good manners for the male passengers to remain standing.
Bar 5000
Bacari specialise in wine, of course, and Bar 5000 takes that mandate seriously, offering an impressive selection of vino bio, vino
biodinámico and vino vegano.
The first is organic wine (made from grapes grown without chemical fertilisers or fungicides), while the second are wines vinified without supplemental yeast or other additives. As for vegan wines, they are clarified without gelatin, a fining agent derived from animal bones.
And all three are available on a 120-bottle list at this new-school wine bar, located on the tranquil Campo San Severo in the Castello District near Piazza San Marco.
The clean modern interior runs to up-lit brick walls, polished concrete floors, and a chandelier blown by Murano glass master Fabio Fornasier. Weather permitting, you can sit at one of a handful of tables along the quiet Severno canal.
When it comes to the cicchetti,
Bar 5000 may lack the jaw-dropping variety of All’arco or Già Schiave, but the six to eight daily selections in the showcase are thoughtfully chosen and well prepared.
A plump salty sun-dried tomato crowns a crostino of sopressata cut paper-thin. Fresh oranges and
mostarda (fruit jam) counterpoint a tiny wedge of Monte Veronese cheese. The pickles come from vegetables grown on Sant’erasmo Island.