Venice: Everything Comes from the Sea
From cuttlefish to monkfish tail, shore crabs to thick-bearded mussels, seafood is a way of life in this Watery city. Departures reports on the best of Venice’s defining cuisine and the pressures threatening to reshape it.
It’s lunchtime in Venice, and my friend Bepi and I are sitting under a red umbrella in front of a restaurant called Busa Alla Torre on the tourist-clogged glassblowing island of Murano. There are tourists here too, but Bepi, a retired bank auditor and part-time glass merchant from neighboring Burano, takes his eating seriously (“The best moment of the day,” he says, “is when your knees are under the table”). Plus, he’s an old friend of the establishment’s proprietor, Lele Masiol, so I’m pretty sure our meal is going to be something special.
Big, red-haired, red-faced and gregarious, Masiol looks like he should be running a pub in County Tipperary, not a trattoria on the Venetian lagoon. But he’s a local boy too, and when Bepi says “Today we want to eat alla Buranese”—Burano-style—Masiol knows exactly what he means and heads for the kitchen.
Five minutes later, he returns with a couple of plates covered in shrimp barely an inch long, lightly floured and fried and still in their edible shells. They are accompanied by a big spoonful of baccalà mantecato, a creamy purée of stockfish (the air-dried brother of salt cod), a dish so important to the local cuisine that there is a confraternità, or brotherhood, dedicated to its appreciation. It also comes with a small slab of grilled white polenta, which is about the most delicious bit of cornmeal mush I think I’ve ever tasted.
We’ve barely finished when the next course arrives: slightly larger shrimp, peeled and quickly boiled, then dressed with olive oil and parsley and served with fried baby artichokes from the garden island of Sant’Erasmo alongside a pool of soft white polenta. Polenta is the defining starch in traditional Venetian cooking (pasta and risotto were rare in working-class homes here until the mid-20th century), and there’s more of it with the next dish. This time it comes with moleche, softshell shore crabs about the size of silver dollars, in saor, which means marinated in vinegar with sweet onions, pine nuts and raisins. “Okay,” says Masiol, “now I’ll give you risotto di gô.” This is a dish found nowhere else but Venice, though rarely on the ten-language tourist menus. Gô (“goby” in English) is a small fish that’s too bony to eat by itself but is used to flavor rice—which many cooks manage by putting poached gô in a linen bag and squeezing the juices into the pot. Because the flavor of gô is mild, Masiol has upped the ante by adding two varieties of minuscule clams, known locally as bevarasse and malgarotte, neither any bigger than a baby’s fingernail.
Finally, just to make sure we’ve had enough to eat, Masiol brings a gorgeous fritto misto. He has prepared it with moleche and lots of scampi, the emblematic Adriatic crayfish—actually a tiny lobster (and nothing to do, incidentally, with the garlicky shrimp dish that’s popular in Italian-American restaurants)—as well as thin bits of zucchini, onion, eggplant, sweet pepper and carrot. “Lele buys at least half of his seafood from retired fishermen who bring back just a little of this and a little of that,” says Bepi as we finish. “That’s why he has some of the best in Venice.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but as we were enjoying this excellent repast, the Giudecca canal, in the heart of Venice, was clogged with fishing boats (an estimated 200 of them) protesting the Italian government’s implementation of new European Union fishing rules. These would, among other things, mandate the use of nets with mesh large enough to let most of what Bepi and I ate at Busa Alla Torre slip through.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that in Venetian cuisine, everything comes from the sea. In this case, “sea” means the Mediterranean in general and the Adriatic in particular, but especially the salty expanses of the Venetian lagoon—a vast wetland, one of the largest in the Mediterranean basin, covering about 136,000 acres of mudflats, salt marshes and open water. Several of the islands in this lagoon yield vegetables of extraordinary quality, and its tidal fringes harbor wild ducks and other game birds that are an important part of traditional Venetian cooking. But the real bounty is the breathtaking array of top-quality fish, shellfish and cephalopods (squid, octopus and the like), some of them found only here.
