How to Eat Local in Venice
- Lucy and the lens
- Jul 23, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 15, 2020
When researching a trip, local food is one of the first things we look into. We tend to gravitate towards restaurants on quiet streets, places recommended by locals, and street food. Venice was no exception: one of the first warnings I heard was "don't just eat pizza!" Why? Every region of Italy has its own specialty, whether it's pizza, carbonara, or bolognese, and pizza is certainly not Veneto's! I was also wary of seafood after reading horror stories of unscrupulous restaurants charging a small fortune for a plate of fish, so I knew I needed an expert to guide me towards the stuff the locals eat!
I only had to look as far as AirBnB to find a top-rated Venice street food tour, with a focus on light bites and local specialties. Here's what we did....and sorry, there's no pizza involved!
Note: I've also added a couple of bonus foodie stops at the end: I visited these the day after my tour, based on recommendations from locals! Then, to wrap things up, I've included some tips for how to eat well in Venice, avoid tourist traps and scams, and support local businesses!
A Secret View
We began the tour with a panoramic view of Venice that I never would have discovered if it wasn't for my local guide! It turns out that the expensive T Fondaco des Tedeschi department store next to the Campo San Bartolomeo has a secret on its roof...a completely free view of the Grand Canal snaking through the old city. You have to sign up to book a 15-minute time slot, but there's no cost at all for this, and it's entirely worth the effort! Just another reason to book a food tour with a local, right?
Food Stop 1: Cicchetti at a historic cantina
You can tell that Cantina Do Mori is very, very old because it's named after the street it sits on. This is a general rule for determining if a restaurant or bar is historic or new, it turns out: the ones that are at least a few centuries old get to claim the street name as their own! Cantina Do Mori is the oldest bacaro (wine bar) in Venice, founded in 1462, and it shows in its decor and selection of traditional light bites, cicchetti. Cicchetti often comes in the form of slices of bread with various toppings on it, but here we tried a big chunk of ubriaca, which translates as 'drunk cheese' because it's made with the skin of grapes used for making wine!
Food stop 2: A local seafood specialty at Venice's best street food joint
Acqua & Mais serves some of the best street food in the city, and is even a little famous in Italy after being featured in a Netflix food documentary. We were there to try one of Venice's two most traditional offerings: baccala mantecato. This is dried, salted cod that is creamed, and usually served with grilled polenta, crispy on the outside and a little gooey on the inside. The combination of creamy cod and crispy polenta was an absolute winner!
Food Stop 3: A fisherman's lunch
Our guide took us to the fruit, veg and fish market near to the Rialto Bridge, and there we learned about how the Venice lagoon provides almost all of the fish on offer in the city. We also learned about Venice's traditional fisherman's dish, sarde in saor, which translates roughly as 'sweet sour sardines'. Sardines are fried and marinated with onions, vinegar, and raisins: sounds odd, but it was so delicious I went back for more the next day! We tried this fisherman's dish on bread at another wine bar, as well as a cicchetti featuring artichoke hearts: apparently, Venetians only eat the hearts and don't bother with the rest!
Food Stop 4: Heavenly pastry from a local bakery
Mauro el Forner de Canton is a family-run institution in Venice, serving up freshly-baked bread, pastries and biscuits of every description. We got to try two types of baked goods: first, the Bussola Buranello, a subtly sweet shortbread biscuit from the nearby island of Burano in the Venice Lagoon; second, the light and crispy pastry called a sfogliatine, made of puff pastry with a crackly, caramel top. Delicious!
Food Stop 5: It wouldn't be an Italian food tour without gelato!
There are too many gelato stores in Venice to count, which is why we were happy to be guided in our choice! We were brought to Gelateria il Doge, one of the city's highest-rated options and completely free of fancy frills and gimmicks. We tried the traditional flavour, 'Crema del Doge', a combination of dark chocolate and orange that somehow worked perfectly!
And here are some other local gems!
Bonus Food Stop 1: Baci & Pasta
Who said pasta can't be street food? At family-run Baci & Pasta, you can choose from a selection of freshly-made gnocchi, tortellini, and other types of pasta and combine it with a sauce of your choice. It's served in a paper dish and you eat it out in the little square outside. I got the spinach gnocchi, which completely changed my perception of what gnocchi could be!
Bonus Food Stop 2: Osteria Al Squero
This wine and cicchetti bar has become popular recently, but its location still makes it feel like a local secret. Once you've bought your cicchetti from the counter, you can go and sit on the wall beside the canal and watch people mending gondolas in the 'squero', or gondola workshop, on the other side. I had four delicious, flavourful cicchetti here.
Bonus Food Stop 3: SuSo Gelatoteca
SuSo holds its ground against all the other gelato places in Venice by offering a range of really creative flavours at an even more reasonable price. I got two huge and delicious scoops - pistachio with cherries in one, and lemon cheesecake in the other - for just 3 euros, far less than I expected for the quality of the ice cream! There's also a beautiful canal view just a few steps away, to stop and eat it all up!
Tips for Eating in Venice
Seriously - book a food tour! There's no better way to try the best local foods. Your guide will help you to filter out the tourist traps and the poorly-rated, leaving just the places locals visit themselves! It also helps to support family-run businesses. If you liked what you ate, you can then look for these items on future menus!
Avoid St Mark's Square and the Rialto Bridge! Restaurants here cater to a huge number of guests, so the food is likely to be mass-produced and poorer in quality, not to mention with prices set at a premium. A lot of restaurants in this area have a different 'menu' for tourists and locals: I nipped into a cafe near Rialto Bridge to grab a quick hot chocolate, and watched astounded as the manager (with much gesticulation) berated the barista for giving me the 'premium' hot chocolate rather than the lower-quality 'tourist' stuff!
Look out for warning signs. It's easy to tell if a restaurant caters to tourists instead of locals. If there's someone standing at the door with a menu to entice you in, don't stop. Walk on by! If the menu has pictures, walk on by! We often go so far as to avoid places with English menus at all! Don't be intimidated by this: Google Translate goes a long way, and in a local place you can always ask the waiter for their recommendations without fear that they're trying to rip you off! By the same token, if a waiter in a tourist restaurant gives you a recommendation, be careful that they're not trying to up-sell you on something pricey!
Watch out for seafood. It's no secret that tourist-heavy restaurants in Venice have a reputation for ripping foreigners off when it comes to ordering seafood. A common tactic is to list a price, which guests assume is for the entire dish, while in a footnote stating that this price is per pound or per kilo. Some restaurants go so far as to claim that your fish weighed more than it did, in order to charge you more.
Watch out for 'complimentary sides', too: these will usually not be free at all and added to your bill at the end. If you didn't order it, turn it down. Simple. The same goes for after-dinner drinks: if you're offered a glass of limoncello before the bill comes, you're paying for it. If it comes after you've paid the bill, lucky you!
To avoid scams, just opt for less tourist-heavy areas for a meal. It's so much easier, right? Try Cannaregio (an area popular with cash-strapped students, plus you get to explore the Jewish quarter!), Castello, or Dorsoduro (near the Accademia Bridge for sunset views of the Grand Canal!). I also found that just leaving the main streets leading up to St Mark's Square and opting for a side alley worked well, too!
Visit a bacaro for cheap wine! A bacaro is a bar that serves only wine, for extremely reasonable prices! You can get a glass for as little as 2 euros, and a Prosecco for 3. It will probably be cheaper than ordering wine at a restaurant, as this will always be marked up! You can also eat cicchetti here, which will cost you less than a sit-down meal, too!
Drink your coffee standing up at the bar. It's significantly cheaper. If you choose to drink your coffee 'al tavolo', you're essentially paying a tourist tax, since locals always drink theirs standing! One famous example is Caffe Florian in St Mark's Square, which charges 15 euros for a coffee at the table, and less than 5 if you drink it standing at the bar! At most cafes, though, you look to save at least a couple of euros by staying on your feet.
Do your research and stick to regional dishes. Genuine, local-favoured Italian restaurants avoid cooking specialties from other regions of the country. A restaurant that offers 'bolognese' isn't going to be any good, for example: eat that in Bologna instead. Same goes for carbonara: go to Rome for that! Even pizza should really be best enjoyed in Naples, its place of origin! If you've read this far, you know what's local to Venice, so you should be good to go!
Don't try to adapt a pasta dish. If you've found a great local restaurant offering a small range of quality pasta dishes, don't try and amend them by switching out the sauce or the type of pasta. Certain pastas are chosen for the way certain sauces stick to them: a good restaurant wouldn't serve thin spaghetti noodles with ragu sauce, for example, since the meaty sauce sticks better to wider noodles! Trust the restaurant to serve you the best combination of pasta and sauce.
Visit the places in this blog post! All of them! Eat as much as you can! Your stomach, your wallet, and the family-run businesses of Venice will thank you!
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