A guide from San Marco 615
Restaurants in Venice
Where to eat in each sestiere, what to order, how to read a menu, and how to tell a real kitchen from one trading on the address.
Sestieri
Six districts
each eats differently
Typical hours
Lunch 12:00–14:30
dinner 19:00–22:00
Coperto
Usually €2–3
must be on the menu
Booking
Essential for dinner
Easter to October
Start here
Eating well in Venice is mostly a matter of knowing where you are
Venice is divided into six sestieri, and each one eats differently. San Marco is the busiest and the most expensive. Cannaregio and Dorsoduro are cheaper and where more Venetians actually eat. San Polo, around the Rialto market, is where to go for fish. Castello is quiet and traditional within a few minutes of the crowds.
The city’s reputation for bad, expensive food is half earned. Venice receives an enormous number of visitors, most of whom will never come back, and some kitchens are built around that fact. But the rules for telling those places apart from the good ones are specific and easy to apply, and most of them are visible from the pavement before you sit down. Those are further down this page.
We have cooked here since 2003, a hundred and fifty metres from the Basilica. This guide is written from that vantage point, so treat the last section as what it is.
Where to eat
The six sestieri
San Marco
The busiest and the most expensive, and the one most people are staying near. Quality varies more here than anywhere else in the city: excellent kitchens sit beside places trading purely on the address. Worth knowing which is which before you sit down.
Cannaregio
The long northern sestiere, and where a lot of Venetians actually eat. The Fondamenta della Misericordia stretch is lined with bacari. Cheaper, later, noisier, and further from the main sights than most visitors realise.
Castello
East of San Marco and much quieter within a few minutes' walk. Traditional, residential, and strong on seafood. The area around via Garibaldi feels like a different city from the piazza.
Dorsoduro
The university sestiere, so younger and better value. Campo Santa Margherita is the centre of it. Good for an evening that starts with a spritz and stays out.
San Polo
Home to the Rialto market, which is the reason the fish here is worth seeking out. The bacari immediately around the market are an institution, and busiest at midday.
Santa Croce
The least visited of the six, nearest the car terminal at Piazzale Roma. Quiet, and where you find prices that have not been adjusted for tourism.
What to order
Venetian dishes worth crossing the city for
Venetian cooking is not Italian cooking in general. It is a lagoon cuisine, built on fish, onions, vinegar, polenta and rice rather than tomato and long pasta. These are the dishes that tell you a kitchen knows where it is.
- Sarde in saor
- Sardines marinated with onion, vinegar, pine nuts and raisins. The oldest dish on any Venetian menu, invented to preserve fish at sea.
- Bacalà mantecato
- Stockfish whipped with olive oil into a pale cream, eaten on grilled polenta. Despite the name, made with dried cod rather than salt cod.
- Risotto al nero di seppia
- Cuttlefish ink risotto. Black, glossy, and far gentler in flavour than it looks.
- Bigoli in salsa
- Thick wholewheat pasta in a slow-cooked onion and anchovy sauce. A plain dish done properly.
- Fegato alla veneziana
- Calf’s liver with onions, served with polenta. The city’s best-known meat dish.
- Moeche
- Lagoon crabs caught in the few days after they shed their shell, then fried whole. The season is a moult, not a quota: roughly April to May and again October to November, and it shifts with the water temperature. They are expensive, around 120 euro a kilo. Moeche on a menu in July are frozen — which, as below, the menu has to say.
Cicheti and bacari
A bacaro is a Venetian wine bar, and cicheti are the small plates on its counter: half an egg with anchovy, a square of polenta with baccalà, a crostino. You stand, you eat two or three, you drink a small glass of wine called an ombra, and you move on. It is the cheapest good eating in the city and the most local thing you can do at six in the evening.
The honest list
The best eating in Venice is often not in a restaurant
Nobody who runs a restaurant here can rank the restaurants neutrally, so we are not going to try. What we can tell you is where the good eating actually is, and a fair amount of it is not in a dining room at all: it is standing at a bacaro counter with a glass, or in front of a market stall, or at a pastry counter at eight in the morning.
These are the places we would point a friend towards. Every detail was checked against each business’s own information before it was published, but days and hours change, so confirm before you cross the city.
The bacari, for cicheti and a glass
Standing, cheap, and how Venetians actually eat before dinner. None of these take a booking and none of them have room to sit.
All’Arco
San Polo 436, a minute from the Rialto market
Cicheti built each morning from what the market had: baccalà mantecato, sarde in saor, inventive crostini. Run by the Pinto family. Open mornings until about 14:30, closed Sunday. Tiny, and famous enough now that you will not be the only visitor in it.
Cantina Do Mori
San Polo 429, Calle dei Do Mori
Traditionally dated to 1462 and usually called the oldest bacaro in the city, though its own chroniclers hedge that. A single long counter between two doors, about twenty wines by the glass, and the francobolli — postage-stamp tramezzini. Closed Sunday, and closes at 15:00 on Saturday.
Cantine del Vino già Schiavi
Dorsoduro 992, on the canal opposite the San Trovaso squero
A working wine shop with five hundred labels that is also a bacaro. The crostini are made fresh through the day and are the reason half of Venice now copies the style. There is no seating at all: you stand on the fondamenta. Closed Sunday.
Where the good kitchens buy
Not a restaurant, and the single most useful hour a curious eater can spend here.
The Rialto market and the Pescaria
San Polo, on the Grand Canal north of the bridge
The fish market has been on this spot since 1459; the neo-Gothic loggia dates from 1907. Fish counters trade Tuesday to Saturday only, mornings, and are shut Sunday and Monday because the boats do not land on a Sunday. Go before 10:00. What you see on the ice — moeche, granseola, canoce, folpetti — is what should be on a good menu that week.
For a pastry or a coffee
Pasticceria Tonolo
Dorsoduro 3764, near San Pantalon
The city’s benchmark pastry counter and the centre of the annual argument about who makes the best frittelle at Carnival. A family firm founded in 1886 on the mainland at Mirano and in this shop since 1953. Standing room only, closed Monday, Sunday mornings only. Expect a queue.
Caffè Florian
Piazza San Marco 57, under the Procuratie Nuove
Opened on 29 December 1720 and generally described as the oldest continuously operating coffee house in Italy. Worth seeing once, with clear eyes: a coffee runs to several euro, a spritz to well over ten, and a per-person surcharge applies when the orchestra plays, April to October. You are paying for three hundred years and the best address in Europe, not for the coffee.
For a sit-down dinner we are not going to hand you a ranking, because any list published by a restaurant is an advertisement wearing a guide’s clothes. What the section below gives you instead is the six checks that separate a real kitchen from one trading on its address. They work on us as well as on anybody else.
Before you sit down
Six ways to tell a real kitchen from a tourist trap
Most of these you can check from the street, and two of them are matters of law rather than opinion.
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The menu must be displayed outside. That is the law.
Veneto regional law 29/2007, article 30, requires every eating place to display its prices so they can be read from outside during opening hours, and requires a menu listing dishes and prices to be posted outside that matches the one you are handed at the table. A place in Venice with no menu on the door is not being discreet. It is breaking a rule that every one of its neighbours is following.
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Frozen ingredients must be declared, and in Veneto there is no loophole
National rules require food that was frozen and sold defrosted to be marked “decongelato”, with some exemptions for ingredients inside a finished dish. Veneto removes the exemptions: article 30 of the same regional law says plainly that the menu must state whether food that is not fresh is frozen. Look for the asterisks. A single blanket sentence in small print at the bottom is not the same thing.
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Ask what the coperto is
The coperto, a per-person cover charge, is legal in Veneto and usually two to three euro, more in central Venice. The same regional law requires any such surcharge to be stated on the price list and the menu. So it is not a scam — but if it was not disclosed before you ordered, you are entitled to question it. Rome is different: Lazio banned the coperto outright in 2006, which is why visitors who arrive from there are often surprised by it here.
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“Per etto” means per 100 grams
Whole fish and large cuts of meat are often priced per 100 g rather than per portion. A sea bass at 9 euro per etto weighing 600 g is 54 euro, not 9. Ask for the weight and the total before it goes to the grill.
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A tout at the door is a signal
Kitchens confident of their food do not need someone standing outside persuading you in. It is not a guarantee of anything either way, but it correlates.
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Menus in eight languages with photographs
Photographs of every dish and a laminated menu in eight languages point at a kitchen serving turnover rather than a repertoire. Plenty of good places translate their menu. Very few photograph it.
Practicalities
Times, booking and the afternoon problem
Most Venetian kitchens serve lunch from around 12:00 to 14:30 and dinner from about 19:00 to 22:00, and a good many close entirely in between. Venice also eats earlier than southern Italy: a kitchen that stops at ten here would be just filling up in Naples.
That gap catches visitors out constantly. If you come off a late train, or out of the Basilica at four in the afternoon, you will find a lot of closed kitchens and a lot of bar sandwiches. Places with genuinely continuous service exist but are not the norm, and it is worth checking before you plan your day around a late lunch.
For dinner, book. From Easter to early October, and over Carnevale, Christmas and New Year, book well ahead. The city has far more visitors than it has covers.
Full disclosure
Where we fit into this
This guide is published by a restaurant, so here is the relevant part stated plainly rather than dressed up as a recommendation.
Ristorante La Piazza is at San Marco 615, about 150 metres from St Mark’s Basilica, three minutes on foot with no bridge to cross. Two brothers opened it in 2003 and it has been on the same site since. It is in the busiest sestiere, which is precisely the area this page tells you to be careful in, so: the prices are printed beside every dish on the menu and on the website, and we serve continuously from 11:00 to 24:00, seven days a week, which solves the afternoon problem above.
The kitchen cooks Venetian and Italian dishes to order: Adriatic fish, pasta made in the building, pizza including gluten free bases, and meat from the grill. Our team speaks Italian, English, French, German, Chinese, Korean and Dutch. More detail is in our FAQ.
If you are eating elsewhere, the six checks above are the useful part of this page. Take them with you.
Questions
Eating in Venice, answered
Where should I eat in Venice?
It depends mostly on which sestiere you are in. San Marco is the busiest and most expensive; Cannaregio and Dorsoduro are cheaper and where more Venetians eat; San Polo around the Rialto market is the place for fish; Castello is quiet and traditional. Wherever you are, check that prices are displayed outside and that frozen items are marked with an asterisk on the menu.
What are the best restaurants in Venice?
It depends what you want from the meal, and a lot of the best eating in Venice is not in a restaurant. For cicheti and a glass standing up, All’Arco and Cantina Do Mori in San Polo and Cantine del Vino già Schiavi in Dorsoduro are the classic bacari, all closed on Sunday. For pastry, Pasticceria Tonolo in Dorsoduro, closed Monday. For a sit-down dinner, judge the place rather than the list: prices legible from the street, frozen items asterisked, a short menu, and nobody at the door persuading you in.
Is the menu required to be displayed outside a restaurant in Venice?
Yes. Veneto regional law 29 of 2007, article 30, requires prices to be displayed so they can be read from outside during opening hours, and requires a menu listing dishes and prices to be posted outside matching the one used inside. It also requires the menu to state whether food that is not fresh is frozen, and requires any surcharge such as a coperto to be shown on the price list.
How do I avoid a tourist trap restaurant in Venice?
Look for four things. Prices displayed legibly from outside, which regional rules require. Asterisks marking frozen ingredients, which Italian law requires. A short menu rather than one photographed in eight languages. And nobody standing at the door persuading you in.
What is a coperto and do I have to pay it?
The coperto is a per-person cover charge, standard across Italy, usually two to three euro and higher in central Venice. It is legitimate provided it is stated on the menu. Ask to see it before you order if it is not obvious.
What time do restaurants serve food in Venice?
Most Venetian kitchens serve lunch from around 12:00 to 14:30 and dinner from about 19:00 to 22:00, and many close between the two. Venice eats earlier than Rome or Naples. If you want to eat in the middle of the afternoon you need a place with continuous service, which is less common than visitors expect.
What food is Venice known for?
Seafood from the lagoon and the Adriatic, and a handful of specific dishes: sarde in saor, bacalà mantecato, risotto al nero di seppia, bigoli in salsa and fegato alla veneziana. Cicheti, the small plates served in bacari, are the local equivalent of tapas.
Do I need to book a restaurant in Venice?
For dinner, yes, particularly from Easter to October and over Carnevale, Christmas and New Year. Lunch is usually easier. Venice has far more visitors than covers, and the better places fill first.
Where can I eat near St Mark’s Square?
Ristorante La Piazza is at San Marco 615, about 150 metres from St Mark’s Basilica and roughly three minutes on foot with no bridge to cross. It has been open on the same site since 2003 and serves continuously from 11:00 to 24:00 every day.
Find us
San Marco 615, Venezia
Three minutes from St Mark’s Basilica, with no bridge to cross. Open every day, 11:00 to 24:00.
San Marco 615, 30124 Venezia VE · +39 041 523 1100 · WhatsApp · [email protected]