Venice Food
Eating out in Venice a few years ago was a hit-or-miss experience and many restaurants charged over the top prices for meals. However, the city now offers a range of gastronomic delights to suit all tastes and budgets.
Venice is an unusual city that offers a blend of numerous cooking styles and dishes. Most dishes include the herb Polenta, a corn-based ingredient, which adds a rich flavour to most foods. Traditional dishes include potato gnocci with spidercrab sauce, spaghetti cooked in a rich squid ink sauce and pumpkin risotto.
Venetian cuisine is essentially fish-based and many restaurants serve fish of the Adriatic including sea bass, mackerel, mullet and soft-shelled crabs. Fish is commonly dressed with onions, spiced vinegar, pine nuts and raisins. If you are not keen on fish on its own, tasty risottos are a safe option to order in a Venician restaurant. Liver and onion or fegato alla veneziana and rice and peas, risi e bisi, are also Venetian specialities.
For those who want to pick up a simple snack while they are making their way around the city to see all the sights then cichetti or bar snacks are highly recommended. They are similar to Spanish tapas and are traditionally served as a lunchtime snack along with a glass of wine. They are best sampled in the city's old-fashioned bars and inns, which are easily found.
For a general Italian experience, it is hard to know where to start in Venice. The city is full of pizzerias and trattorias, smaller, simpler eateries, which offer good value for money tasty meals and smaller snacks. Rosticceries are also perfect places to pick up a light bite and are dotted all over Venice. They are usually packed out with students and young people at lunchtimes. Venice is also famous for its paticceries, where tourists can pick up sweets, cakes and ice-creams.
As well, as traditional Italian or Venetian dishes, the city also plays host to an array of high-quality international restaurants, including Arabic, Mexican, French and Chinese.
Wine is the staple drink of the Venetians and the Venato region produces more white wine than red from the hilltops of Soave. Red wines are also popular and come from Bardolino and Valpolicella and are traditionally produced from the Corvina grape. For those on a strict budget, a glass of local wine can cost a mere 30p but the quality is questionable! Splash out slightly more to get a quality ombra or glass.
The Italians enjoy a glass of sparkling wine, spumante, with their seafood and this drink is the basis of bellini, an aperitif of wine mixed with sweet fruity juice that can be enjoyed as a refreshing treat in the heat of the summer. Dessert wines, such as verduzzo dorato and the strawberry-flavoured fraglino, are also popular and are normally served with busolai – sweet biscuits baked locally on the island of Burano.
Whether you enjoy sampling the traditional Venetian delights or would rather snack on a range of high-quality international snacks, Venice has something to suit every palate and will leave you satisfied and wanting more.
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Eating and drinking
