Dreams occasionally do come true, or if not a dream, at least an aspiration. Fate sometimes tilts your way. On a visit to Venice, Italy, I was chasing a particular risotto dish held in my mind for some years.
I found one good way to achieve a goal is to announce it to the world, and let the world shift in your favor.
My goal seemed simple: a particular dish of risotto, found on an island near Venice, Italy. Yet risotto in general has been flummoxing me for decades, because on four visits to Italy, each one has been solo. The problem is that restaurants usually require at least two people for risotto—it’s not worth it for them otherwise, as it’s a labor-intensive dish. Many, many times I have ordered it, or even just inquired, and have been told no, I need a partner, and had to settle for pasta instead. Dare I keep dreaming?
I loved flavored rice, just about anything. Italian risotto, Spanish paella, Indian biryani, Persian pilaf. Something about starch cooked with flavor, instead of just adding it at the end, sends me skyward. One particular risotto here became my plan, and for this, I must evoke a name: Anthony Bourdain
Back in January 2009, the foodie-travel TV show “No Reservations” visited Venice, and showed a particular risotto dish that made quite the impression on me. Risotto de gò is made with the lagoon-dwelling goby fish, tiny, fatty things. Ugly and spiny. Called ghiozzo in Italian, but just gò in the Venetian dialect, and no I don’t know what the diacritic is for. The ingredients are rice, a fish stock made with gò fish, and seemingly almost nothing else.
One must be quite careful with the broth, not to break the fish up, or it will become bitter. Recipes I find online also use the standard carrot, celery, and onion for the broth. One says to mash the solids, including the fish, to get all the flavor. Eh? The TV show said no, “you can’t disturb the little fish”, because if you break them up, it’s bitter. Or something. Just like everything in life, opinions vary. Shallot and wine can be used too, garlic and bay leaf, butter and grated cheese at the end, and even Bourdain’s dish used finely chopped parsley. Some recipes say simmer the fish an hour, others overnight until they all break down. Best rice is apparently carnaroli or vialone nano. Never heard of either.
“There is good risotto, there is great risotto, and every once in a while, there is perfect risotto,” Bourdain declared. And this is it. What everyone remembers from that show is the shots of the kitchen, where the cooks are stirring the pot. “And then he flicks the rice,” the local narrator says, and we see, over and over, a stream of creamy rice shoots up from the pot, like more than half a meter above it, and fall back. It’s a whoa! moment. It will stay with you.
I was not obsessed with this dish. It was not my new Roman Empire. But it’s fun hunting down a dish when traveling. Just a few days earlier, I snared a huge win in the nearby city of Verona, Italy, with a different type of risotto, made with the local upscale wine called Armeretto. It’s a Thing there. Walking along, I passed a restaurant advertising that very dish.
“Fate!” thought a vexed I at the door, then strode in boldly, asking if a single traveler can reach satisfaction. My server, older than I, was cooler than cool. “Yes, you are one person,” he observed, with the wisdom of Solomon. It helped that the restaurant was dead and so they probably wanted another customer. Plus, I asked about the risotto before I was seated, which I think is a good thing. If you’re settled into your chair, they may not bend to your will. You’re already here, and thus you’ll just order something else. Establish your order at the start, making them afraid you’ll leave should your quite reasonable demands not be satisfied. I got my risotto for one there, a huge win in my book.
But that was an anomaly—my failure rate with risotto overall is perfect except for this, and I didn’t expect success otherwise. I know that the restaurant Bourdain dined in (Romana’s, although of course there are others), is quite popular and it’s not in Venice proper, rather on the island of Burano, a boat ride (of course) away, and surely they wouldn’t cater to the likes of me.
I was in Venice for the last time, surely. I first went there when I was 25, first time in Italy, spending four days there and loving it. But since then, the worldwide tourism surge was plenty serious, so much that Venice was just then instituting a fee for day-trippers and it seemed now merely a Disneyland for tourists. But I wanted to see it again, just once, and then probably I won’t feel like returning. I also wanted better photos, since at 25 I didn’t know anything about photography.
The only way I would visit Veniceland was way, way off-season, and thus here I am in January, about as far off-season as one can get. I would encourage anyone else to not visit anywhere near the summertime. Usually a traveler has a General MacArthur attitude to visited places, “I shall return,” but I knew that this second visit would be it, really for my lifetime. No reason to come back, and certainly not outside of wintertime.
So sometime in my five days here, I must take the boat to Burano and try my luck with that risotto.
One of my good friends had introduced me to the habit of taking food tours when traveling, something she did in nearly every city she visits, and something I’ve never done. I’m down on the idea of tours in general, a travel snob who feels he doesn’t need to be introduced to things, someone who can do it on his own. But my friend talked me into it, and thus the first full day in Venice, I had signed up with Secret Food Tours, the company she uses.
The description on their Venice food tour web page states that the tour starts off with a coffee, okay. Then this:
Next, you’ll have the privilege of trying the famous cicchetti – local tapas from Veneto – paired with the real Select Spritz while you have a romantic view of the canals in front of you.
…and then you’ll try prosecco. Cicchetti (like Spanish pintxos) are indeed a Thing in Venice, but I had arrived the previous evening and had gotten cicchetti and prosecco on my own well enough; I didn’t need to pay €100 for a tour guide to point these out to me. Also, I know how to get my own coffee. This is why I’m a snob about tours. Also, I speak some Italian, about half-way, and can ask for things on my own.
And yet, here I was, signed up online for their tour, trying it out. Their meeting point was in front of an old theatre, and I picked out the guide quickly. I’ll call her Giulia. We made our introductions, and the next lines I’ll remember for a while.
“Many people today?” I intelligently ask her.
Her eyes change. “Only you,” she smartly replies.
Just me. So I now have a private tour. This is amazing. Giulia led me to the first stop, for coffee. Gosh I would never figure out how to get coffee in Italy for myself, silly me, so this is a good first time and wham, no no no, she crashed my notions quickly. We stopped at a nearby shop and she explained how this place is damn special, not normal coffee. They use manual pull machines only and do it in a way that removes most of the bitterness from the coffee. I order a macchiato and wowo, it’s grand. This is the best coffee I’ve had in Italy. The tour is working out.
Next we had the “privilege of trying the famous cicchetti” at a place that Giulia knew and damn, their cicchetti was fantastic. We sat outside and talked of cicchetti and how it started, and my theory that Spanish pintxos had made it more popular (Giulia admitted I was correct) and so forth and suddenly I realized the value of a food tour. Not that it introduces you to coffee, but that it shows you damn good coffee. And discusses cicchetti, not just show you good ones.
After that, Giulia basically dropped the idea of being a formal tour guide and we just chatted like we were old friends hanging out. She took me to of course several more places, the best one I’ll share with you called Sepa. (Calle de la Bissa, 5482, 30124 Venezia) Hard to find, like everything in Venice, but gold. It’s a snack place, like tapas, something that works for lunch or happy hour, small bites that cost a handful of euros each.
The small bites are more than good enough, but also this place makes risotto every day and it’s brilliant because they make a huge pot and scoop up a bowl for only €5. Small bowl but crap, one can have risotto fresh-made for five euro. That should be more widespread. This place is standing only, like a Japanese tachinomiya, and it’s now my favorite place in the city to eat. The risotto flavor changes every day, and so yes I went back multiple times.
That risotto at Sepa made me mention my quest for that special dish of go risotto on Burano, and of my ongoing problems with getting risotto in this country as a solo traveler. I vented this for a while to Giulia. Then suddenly, she had a solution.
Giulia will be in Burano in two days, doing some research there for a possible future tour. Hey, perhaps we could meet up, and then we’ll have two people for the risotto?
The sky opened and a beam of light shone upon my head. This was gold. Angels started singing. It’s like a secret passage just opened through a stone wall. Suddenly, the solution is in front, laid before me like a golden egg. Sometimes, the world will come up with a solution. I agreed immediately.
Nota Bene: I have no relationship at all with this or any food tour company. I mention them because they’re part of the story, and I liked them, and have used them in four cities now as I write this. I will do more. I did not get this tour, or any other tour, for free. I’ve never asked for any free tour, and I don’t identify myself as a travel blogger during them, not that it would give me the slightest bit of credibility. Some travel bloggers get free things, then write an article on them, saying “all opinions are my own”. I have never done that, ever.
Two days later, I meet up with Giulia on the boat to Burano. The place Bourdain ate is Café Romano, and then it was closed for renovations, of course. But no worries, many place on the island to eat the risotto, and another famous place is called Gatto Nero. Giulia smartly thinks to phone ahead. They’re so popular, even off-season, that we can’t get in until around 2:40, so we’re bumming around Burano for a bit. The island is famous for its lace, and Giulia researching a tour, we drop in several lace shops, who treat us like royalty, like the cash cow that we are, so I got to see the finest lace on the island. I felt like I’m getting a second tour. But then it’s time to eat.
We are at Trattoria al Gato Nero de Ruggero (Ruggero Bovo is the founder, in 1965, and the family still runs it). Again, not the place Bourdain dined, but Jamie Oliver filmed here, and better yet, Stanley Tucci did as well. It’s famous as well, and has the go risotto. The place is decorated old-school Italian, with photos covering all the walls, all the space. Wooden chairs and white tablecloths, the plates all having a distinct pattern and the glasses as well. It’s classy as hell but very comfortable; it won’t make you feel uneasy.
Because we called ahead and ordered, two plates land in front of us five minutes after sitting down. This is it, The Risotto. The moment is now. The feeling of wow, I did it, washed over me. I had simply watched a travel show about a dish across the ocean, and I went and got it myself. I clearly had help with Giulia, but I’m taking tons of credit here. I went there, and I worked to get this dish, and I’m responsible for it. I hate to say it’s a dream come true, but it is, non e vero? At least a small one.
I took out my camera and took about thirty photos. I thanked Giulia over and over. And then it’s time to eat it. Was it the best risotto of my life?
And here I’ll say: it didn’t slay me with its wonderfulness. It was damn, damn good, but most of the satisfaction was my personal triumph of getting this dish. It was really frikking good, but if I had just happened upon it, I would remember it as being a find but not in my top ten dishes.
But really no matter, a dish like this is a sum of everything, including the very good backstory. Never shall I forget this lunch. And it was me, me who got me here. Okay, really it was Giulia who got me here, and I love her for this. Sometimes just putting the word out there about what you want, putting it out into the world, means life helps you out.
