Food

At the beginning of my time here I compiled a list from my various sources of Venetian specialities, mainly odd seafood like cuttlefish and eel, to try. I am slowly working my way through the list, but it is not as straight forward as I thought. The cheaper restaurants – the ones behind a bar filled with workmen or students that I have been to twice do not seem to serve these dishes. The slightly more upmarket restaurants which have menus in the window in Italian, English, and sometimes French and German as well, sometimes do. At one of these, 2 courses, wine and coffee costs about 30 euros – about $60 – more than I want to spend. On the other hand, I’ve come all this way, and the difference between that and a cheaper meal that is usually similar to what I would cook at home that costs about 20 euros is not that much in the total cost of the trip. I have decided to just drink house wine – which is usually quite nice – rather than try some of the different types of regional wine. I sometimes take water and have a swig before I have lunch. A quarto (250ml) of house wine usually costs between 2 and 3 euros, but water often costs more because they only have big bottles of water – they rarely have smaller bottles.

I have tried so far :

Tiramisu
Apple strudel ( they have a lot of it here)\

An antipasto of different cold lagoon caught things – different sized prawns which have different names in Italian ( gamberetti,gamberone, and scampi), something that looked like a grayish prawn called a cicala, polipo or baby octopus and something that the waiter described as the milk of cuttlefish. These were little white balls about half the size of gnocchi and similar texture. I had taken too much of his time and it was stretching it too far to find out if and how it was cooked.

Fegato alla Venezia – liver ( I had calf’s liver but I have seen it described as veal liver in other places) chopped up on a bed of onions with polenta. The polenta was the consistency and colour of mashed pumpkin.

Seppia al nero con polenta – this I had at about 1245. It is now 6.15 and my stomach is still struggling . It is cuttlefish cooked in its own black ink. It was quite tasty but the sauce had really strong flavours. The fish itself was in strips about 5cm by 1cm and quite like well cooked ( i.e. not overdone and chewy) calamari. It was served with polenta but this time it was white and reminded me of blancmange in look and texture. See photo – it looked even less appetizing properly in focus.

They use raddichio quite a lot – I have been given it always in a salad.

I will continue trying things.