An Eating and Drinking Guide to Venice, Minus the Tourists

Katie Parla and I love the Italian south. Katie wrote a book about it—titled, indicatively, Food of the Italian South—and when called upon by this very magazine to review Italian wine, I requested to cover only the wines from the south of Italy (though eventually I was strong-armed into accepting my once-adopted Tuscany, where they do also have some pretty good wine). Katie and I have a podcast, Gola, where we hammer on about this, emphasizing how everyone should spend more time in Italy’s least tourist-trafficked areas. I note all this because it would seem to thoroughly preclude our interest in one Italian city in particular. And yet, we also love Venice. We more than love Venice. We adore Venice and go there often, and we encourage others to do the same—with an asterisk.

How do we reconcile hanging out in a place very much north of the Po that is literally drowning under the weight of an ungainly tourist population? For myself, I can point to the winning combination of preternatural confidence and a high threshold for embarrassment that makes me mostly immune to criticism for hypocrisy, but it’s also true that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, or in this case, to enjoy the capital of a once-great maritime republic.

While most people trudge from the train station over the Rialto to Piazza San Marco without so much as a sideways glance at the rest of the laguna, Venice is in fact composed of more than 100 islands, the vast majority of which remain basically invisible to outsiders. Venice also still experiences extreme swings between high and low seasons, so while from April to October you have to be prepared to karate chop people to death to get from one side of the Centro Storico to the other, as soon as the weather turns cool the city is your playground, especially if you have the right means of transportation.

Besides being my podcast cohost and bucatini’s worst enemy, Katie Parla is known for her extensive and profound knowledge of Italian food and beverage culture, a knowledge she has acquired by personally investigating every angle of the peninsula, so it’s no surprise her intrepid spirit moved her to invest in a proper vehicle for year-round Venetian explorations.

And for my part, if the words “boat” and “shoulder season” are pronounced aloud within 500 miles of my location I can teleport to the dock in mere milliseconds. Most recently we caught a day in late November with weather that felt positively summery but crowds that were mercifully thin—ideal for a crawl hitting some of our favorite Venetian-style bars (or bacari) and taking full advantage of how well you can eat and drink in this city under the right circumstances.

First Port

I pull into Santa Lucia station at 9:45 a.m., just in time to meet Katie for a first stop at Al Mercà, a classic but updated bacaro with a strong selection of natural wines by the glass. It’s right in the belly of the beast at the edge of the Rialto Bridge, but if you arrive at 10 a.m.—a late hour to start drinking by the standards of true Veneziani—you can dip in for a quick sip of the laguna’s native grape Durella or an unfiltered Ribolla Gialla from neighboring Friuli. We split the tuna salad, radicchio and horseradish sandwich because Katie considers it illegal to leave without one, and then pivot north toward the Cannaregio neighborhood, where Laura, Katie’s romantically-named skiff, is tied up.

Having not yet been there myself I’m glad to have a chance for a glass at La Sete, a relatively new addition from the owners of Da Rioba restaurant next door. Both have the same clean, modern but cheerful atmosphere, but the more informal La Sete allows us to keep grazing. When I see baby octopus on toast and a long Champagne list I go comatose with desire and Katie has to smack me back to consciousness so we can keep moving to the now well-established and much-loved Vino Vero, where they vehemently refuse to serve a spritz in any form and where I inevitably end up buying another bottle of Champagne to go “just in case we need it later.”

A friend has generously offered to be our designated captain for the day, so when we tip into the boat the only thing to worry about is making sure our scarves don’t fly off when we hit speed. Another day might have seen us headed in the opposite direction, sitting on the Giudecca with our legs hanging off the fondamenta and Campari spritzes in plastic cups after an early morning stop at the fish market in Chioggia to round up some of the weird frutti di mare that can only be found in the laguna. The Lido is also hauntingly beautiful in late fall and early winter, after the film festival chaos is long gone, but the good weather and overall quiet gives us confidence that we can check out the otherwise usually overcrowded islands Torcello, Murano and Burano off to the northeast of the Centro Storico.

A visit to the Santa Maria Assunta church complex with its extraordinary mosaics followed by lingering in the sun with some more wine and snacks in the garden at Locanda Cipriani on Torcello would be enough to make this a perfect day. But with very little effort Katie convinces me that a stop in Murano for a tramezzino at Bar al Faro followed by a last cocktail on the terrace of the NH hotel is worth lifting myself out of my torpor. Indeed her suggestion proves right—mostly because Robertino, the owner of Bar al Faro, makes his own mayonnaise and dresses his tramezzini with industrial quantities thereof, but also because the view from the NH as we start to lose the last light of day is simply breathtaking.

I have to rally as I’m due for dinner at Pietra Rossa, one of my hands-down favorite places to eat in Italy right now, so I’m hoping that the bracing salt air will somehow allow my body to digest everything I’ve put in it so far today. If not, I know Andrea (the owner) has a substantial grappa collection, so we can cut right to the chase.

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