Eating Venice: Shut Up Henry. I’m Talking


Vaporetto stop St. Stae: Still time to see Illuminations at the Biennele. Photo: Steven Richter

       “There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject,” Henry James said, saying it anyway.  And I will too.  There used to be silent corners in Venice.  Deserted back alleys and remote campos with only the sound of footfall. Now there is no silence. Everyone in Venice is on their cell phones, gesturing emphatically.  Even the dashing gondoliere waiting for a live one is stretched out, gabbing away.  A small regret in a bouquet of delight.

Silence shattered. Everyone in Venice is chattering into a mobile. Photo: Steven Richter

       The Road Food Warrior and I spent four winters in Venice, but haven’t been back since 2005. It’s our first time arriving by water and I am properly moved and thrilled by the spectacle. We’re out on deck as a small tug pushes our ship through the canal to a parking spot a few hundred steps from the Zattere.  Amazing moldering sinking city, still a great beauty, even in the rain. It’s freezing after the unexpected heat of Croatia and Trieste. But not such a long walk to Piazzale Roma to buy two unlimited weekly vaporetto passes, 50 euros each, a total of $130.00. We step onto the lumbering #1 water-bus as it hits all the stops.

At Cantione Gia Schiavi, Mama builds crostini as crew swoops around. Photo: Steven Richter

       Seduction launched. The sun emerges, slashing the water with gold, revealing ruin and renovation. At the Accademia stop we step out to trace familiar routes in Dorsoduro and find ourselves, without even trying, at the celebrated cicchetti  mecca, Cantione: Gia Schiavi, at the foot of the Ponte San Travaso, its walls lined with wine bottles. Mama, thinner and greyer, is still a production line turning out crostini, a leaf of lettuce on every slice of bread, a plop of mantecato, a parsley leaf. Cool human factory, unperturbed, as a duo of men, sons I am guessing, duck around her, filling plates with toothpick-stabbed items we point to in the display case.

You can go home again to Cantione Gia Sciavi. Here is Mama in 2005. Photo: Steven Richter

       Steven has to have an anchovy with onions, smoked tuna, and an oval cut of salami.  Mayonnaise maniac that I am, I’ll have the tuna salad. And a creamy crab. I suppose I ought to try the cod flecked with cocoa, but I’m distracted by a rich drift of ricotta with squash puree on top. Last time we were here we came with friends who made a late lunch of 25 crostini. The men pouring wine for the first ombretta of the day count the toothpicks on our plate. Nine euros.  Ponte San Trovaso. Dorsoduro 992 041 5230034. Closed Sunday.

Alle Testiere’s plump razor clams are a must for the Road Food Warrior. Photo: Steven Richter

       Venice is for romantics and sensualists. It’s not a destination for cuisinary epiphany. But there are surprises, chefs more gifted than others, obsessed perfectionist restaurateurs, dishes that will haunt you.  Among my favorites, tiny Alle Testiere - only nine tables. You must reserve ahead. Never mind that we’re early for our 9 o’clock table and lurk restlessly at the open door. The 7 o’clock customers seem unwilling to leave. Not even dagger gazes move them. We wait for tables to be reset with paper runners, cloth napkins, twisted bread sticks.

Luca is in great form as he gently prods the 7 o’clock clients to go. Photo: Steven Richter

       At last, the lively white Trebbiano di Lugana from Ca Lojera, chosen for me by partner Luca, quenches the antsies. Crisp and full, its compelling after-warmth could make me reconsider my insistence on red wine with everything.  It’s perfect with both the grilled razor clams Steven always orders here, and my pumpkin-ricotta ravioli with sea urchin.  The fish-thickened broth of our guest’s seafood soup is a surprise too, white, not red, the bowl piled high with a Noah’s ark of crustaceans and mollusks. Even a corny old Venetian cliché like bacala mantecato is seductively lush and rich. Surely Steven has tasted two dozen variations on pasta with clams in our two weeks here. This one is the best, with teeny bevarasse clams - “We’ll shell them for you,” Luca offers - perfectly balanced. Our guest’s tender bobbins of baby calamari, just sweetly caramelized on a toss of greens, are savory, tender, vibrant.

The freshness and careful grilling of the calamari is a given here. Photo: Steven Richter

       Bruno’s mother used to do a matchless tiramisu. Not anymore, alas.  But tonight Luca offers almond cake, “the true almond cake of Franco Colussi on the Lungo de San Barnaba.” Retired except for some holiday baking, the celebrated confectioner recently called some restaurant chefs to a little class to learn his recipes, Luca tells us. I waver. “But what about the chocolate cake?”

        “Why not a small piece of each?” says Luca. Brilliant solution – two big triangles nestle against each other. The great man’s nutty almond, the chocolate, neither running amok nor fudgy, nor oversweet, just wonderfully old fashioned.  And Steven’s lemon gelato is boldly, daringly, lemony. Calle de Mondo Nove, Castello 5801. 041 522 2270. Closed Sunday and Monday.

       New on the Guidecca, away from tourist droves and trashy souvenir shops, with its wonderful view of Venice like a tiara across the water, a trio of young men poetically invoke “The sons of the stars, i Figli delle Stelle. ” There are sofas in the bar for sipping wine and lingering.  And a plain room with beige cloths on brown underskirts and a collection of photographs for diners. Sadly, it’s too cold to sit outside tonight.  “The food can be wonderful but it isn’t always,” a Venetian habitué warns.  Tonight, with old friends who have moved to the Guidecca since we last visitied, i Figli with its Puglianese inclinations pleases me.

        Taralli biscuits and Altamura bread are always on the table. The English version of the menu translates the philosophy: daily homemade pastas, the flour of Altamura, cured meats of Friuli, lamb from Apulia’s vaunted Romanelli butcher in the Martina Franca area. The waiter is not so subtly persuading our friends to have the mixed seafood antipasto. I taste the luscious savor of the shrimp in saor – a vinegary marinade usually used with sardines -- and some of their octopus salad. But I must have the recommended puree of fava bean with sautéed chicory, dabs of tomato and sautéed cubes of bread - thick and rich and comforting, healing. It reminds me of my mother’s split pea soup. A large bowl, incredibly filling. Steven’s bigoli in salsa is a bow to Venetian tradition: fat wheat noodles with a sauce of onions and anchovy.

The Puglianese chef isn’t afraid to use fish with spines in his fine fritto misto. Photo: Gael Greene

       As is our friend Frank’s first-rate calf’s liver and onions from the secondi choices at 9.50 euro (for eggplant parmagiana) to 20 euros ($26). His wife Leisl’s fritto misto of sea critters and vegetables is generous too, with small fish as well as crustaceans and mollusks. Chef Luigi Schiralli comes out to accept our compliments. I promise myself to come back for a lunch al fresco the next sunny day. Guideca 70,71 on the fondamente near the Zitelle church and vaporetto stop. 041 523 0004. Closed Wednesday. 

Colombina’s antipasto platter for two is an adventurous starter. Photo: Steven Richter

       It doesn’t take two weeks for Venetian menus to become boring. Back in 2005 a friend discovered a Sicilian spot and we became regulars. Then it closed. Michela Scibilia, a graphic designer and restaurant critic, sends us to Colombina, where Domenic, one of the Sicilian partners, is now cooking. (the English version of Michela’s Venice Osterie, “a handbook for discriminating diners” - VianelloPhotoBooks - is as essential as your vaporetto pass). We follow the crowd exiting at S. Macoula and a friendly local guides us to the campo. The place is nearly deserted, definitely a downer, though old movie stills, jazz, and tea candles in colored glass help. The waiter proposes the house antipasti platter for two for 20 euro, less than our starter choices, and delivers a luscious amuse of chopped tomatoes on toasted bread. I’d come back anytime just for this platter: Luscious sardines rolled around toasted crumbs, chopped octopus, tuna salad, razor clams, tiny snails, gamberetti, a crostini and four of those cartoonish little canocie, with two black eyes in their heads, the sweet mantis shrimp that look like fossilized trilobites.

Salty, fatty and delicious, cacio e pepperoncino in a parmigiana “dish.” Photo: Steven Richter

       We decide to order the spicy spaghetti cacio e pepe, and another pasta with “sea sauce.” The spaghetti comes twirled in a parmesan shell – salty, peppery, fabulous, with more grated cheese on the side, just in case. Alas, the shrimp in the sea sauce are overcooked, the clams don’t have much taste and there are only a few perfect little mussels. The rest look scary. My lips are burning with salt. The layered cassata dessert is shockingly sweet. But there’s enough here to love and more to taste: cavatelli and gnocchi, saddle of lamb. I agree with Michela. Definitely recommended. Campiello del Pegoloto, Canareggio 1828. 041 522 2616. Closed Tuesday.

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Ristorante Quadri


The Michelin-starred Alajmo team kept the Ristorante Quadri interior intact. Photo: Bob Noto 

       I can’t say all of Venice is astir over the arrival of the Alajmo family in Piazza San Marco. Some Venetians are thrilled to have the exquisite food of the Michelin three star Le Calandre in Sarmeola di Rubana outside Padua so close.  Others are sure it will fail because few visitors to Venice care about food or are willing to spend a few hundred dollars for lunch.  I first tasted baby brother Massimiliano’s elegant riffs on Veneto classics when he was still sending out 28 different breads with the tasting dinner. Those Michelin stars later - in 2002 - he was the youngest chef ever to be so honored. Now, with Raffaele in the front and Max in the kitchen, they are a complicated conglomerate and partners at Grand Caffe Quadri, the 1775 institution in San Marco.  After a harrowing, extensive kitchen reinvention, it opened in June.

Michela captures the bread and amuses with her mobile camera. Photo: Michela Scibilia

       Michela thought we should critique the restaurant together, never mind how expensive.  I’m game. Three flights up, a group of Japanese women lunches in the main room with its formidable chandelier as big as a buffalo. The two of us are alone in the next room at a large table swathed in linen overlooking the Piazza. The painted ceiling, brocaded walls, black leather chairs and crystal sconces seem untouched – cleaned, refreshed perhaps. Gauzy black Roman shades are rolled up so we can watch the drama below: Children with pigeons on their heads. The birds are still there even though it is now forbidden to feed them.  A platoon of lithe young women in long black sheaths and head scarves scurry by: a delegation of flight attendants from an Arabic airline, we suppose.

What’s the draw? The view or the $200 euro lunchtime tasting? Photo: Michela Scibilia

       Then lunch distracts. We consider the wit, indeed, the expense of hand-blown glass. Striped water glasses with indentations for fingers. The flat red disc with two holes that serves as a bread plate for spicy tomato breadsticks and thick country bread. We will skip the 195 euro “Classical” tasting for the 160 euro abbreviation – trading plates so we taste everything anyway. “Contamination and identity exist together in contrast searching for the evasive flavor of essence in a state of uplifting suspension…” reads a translation on the English menu, signed by “Max e Raf Alajmo.”  Perhaps it’s less pretentious and more meaningful in Italian. 

The Alajmo brothers, Max top, Raf bottom, pose with Quadri executive chef Silvio Giavedoni (left) and his 2nd.

       As Alan Tardi observes in the October Food Arts, Max’s food is “not modernist or nouvelle or regional or international or post-modernist-deconstructed but rather something quite personal and unique. His approach is almost poetic.” Tardi cites cappuccino della laguna, “…a delicate potato and fish broth velouté over red mullet fillet and clams drizzled with cuttlefish ink and saffron oil with a faint aroma of star anise.”

        We are trading tastes of it now.  It is almost as thrilling as the brilliant carpaccio of langoustine with lemon dressed in a drizzle of mussel-clam sauce, under ribbons of lettuce with a crouton.

        The chef may think he only began to understood his philosophy after writing his 2006 cookbook, Ingredienti.  “Every ingredient must contribute to the memory of the path it has taken to create harmony and fluidity.”  But, in fact, the food we are eating is clearer and not nearly as forced as the explanation. The burrata cheese ravioli with clams, cuttlefish and spiced bread crumbs are almost familiar, real food, delicious. More exciting, perhaps, than the risotto with Venetian sea snails and red wine vinegar, and a dusting of turmeric on the edge of the plate one can toy with.

        The seared guinea hen breast with capers and its sauce of Venetian calf’s liver and coffee is surprisingly dry. The small square of crusty roast suckling pig with porcinis, black trumpets and chanterelles paved with large rounds of black summer truffles is quite perfect, moist and crisp.

A curl of striped blown glass with islands to hold three bon bons. Photo: Michela Scibilia

        Desserts are shockingly ordinary. A melting sorbetto? Three fabulous bon bons in a blown glass holder designed for them restores some faith. The bill - 362 euros or $235 each - is almost anticlimactic. I’m perfectly calm. It’s Venice, after all.  I’m not on a budget. There are four tables working now, all of them tourists, Michela notes. She doubts many locals will come for the tastings. The Alajmo’s will open the Grand Caffe next, serving breakfast, lunch, hoping to capture the locals as well as visitors with late night martinis. Piazza San Marco 121. 041 522 2105.