Tonight's dinner was at Alla Testiere, by far my favorite restaurant in Venice. It's a tiny place, maybe four tables, and the decor is simple, typical Italian cafe. It's also almost impossible to find. The food is great, typical Venetian seafood done with a flair that was lacking in the other restaurants. But the real reason this restaurant stands out is the owners, one of whom cooks and the other works the room. The roomworker does a fanstastic job and is immediately everybody's friend, not in the fake waiter way, where they ask how you are, state their name and their function as today's server, and push some drinks on you. This guy really makes you feel like your best friends without being cloying and intrusive or stereotypically loud Italian. Everyone in the little room is put in a great mood, and it feels like a real celebration. One drawback of the small size and festive environment is that it's hard to get people to leave. So, when we arrived our table wasn't free yet, so he walked us down the street to a nearby bar to wait for fifteen minutes, and watched a little soccer with us as well. (Food-15, Decor-11, Service-20)



By the way, the photos came from the helpful Gastroville website, as we're never going to get comfortable taking photos in restaurants.

Apologies for the small size but this was the only useable photo I could find of our lunch restaurant, Busa alla Torre. It comes highly recommended, and service is very friendly. The restaurant sits by the main canal in Murano, with lots of outdoor seating, which almost never happens in Venice. The day was unusually hot, though, so being outdoors wasn't particularly pleasant. The restaurant specializes in seafood (surprise!) and the menu looked pretty good, but the waiter was so excited about this great quality fish they had just caught so I ordered that. Because it was such great quality, they didn't want to do anything to it, so it just came steamed, which is about the most boring way you can eat fish, no matter how good the quality. Somchai liked his more interestingly prepared food though. Food-11, Decor-7, Service-13.

Had dinner at Da Fiore, Venice's most famous restaurant and it's only one with a Michelin star. Very formal service, and good food, mostly seafood, but the interior is pretty terrible. It's windowless and very low ceilinged. I guess they tried to make the best of a bad location by dressing it up to look like an ocean liner, but it's a pretty depressing place to eat considering you're in the middle of one of the world's most beautiful cities. There is a really cute table for two sticking out the back of the place jutting out above a canal, definitely the table to book. (Food-13, Decor-7, Service-15)

I'm having trouble with the Venice entries because most of what we did during the day was walk along the canals and get lost in obscure neighborhoods. I've got hundreds of photos of these canals, but I have no idea what part of Venice they're in so I keep not using them and instead go from church to museum to palace because those are more easily identifiable and I know when I visited them. So the blog entries seem like we just kept going to churchese but in fact the trip was relatively light on that sort of thing apart from Piazza San Marco. I guess at some point I'll just do a photo dump of canal pics in the blog and call it something pseudo-artsy like Visions of Venice. But for now, it's lunchtime, and we ate at a very famous, and famously hard to find, seafood restaurant, La Corte Sconta. The restaurant sits almost at the edge of the city in an entirely residential neighborhood far from tourist sights, but that all adds to the charm. The interior is a bit dull, but most people opt for the charming outdoor terrace covered with vines. There's no menu, the waiters just chat with you and heavily suggest a series of dishes, all with the freshest seafood available. Everyone starts with a plate of various seafood appetizers, then we had a squid ink pasta, then some grilled fish. Somchai was in heaven, I'm a bit pickier about seafood but thought it was really well done. I must say I don't get the point of squid ink though. It's smelly and thick, and tough to get off my teeth, so I went around looking like a hillbilly for the rest of the day. (Food-15, Decor-15, Service-13).

We had dinner at the hotel's casual restaurant, Cip's Place. The restaurant is on a pier in the lagoon, with fantastic views, although since our room is right behind the restaurant, we had already soaked in the same view for several days already. The food was pretty similar to the formal restaurant but had some casual stuff like pizza as well, although I can't imagine the look of the waiters if you ever actually ordered pizza here. Actually the waiters here were a bit younger and friendlier, the guests were still creakily old and dressed to the nines. (Food-14, Decor-12, Service-15)

We headed back to the piazza for dinner, at Quadri's, one of the world's oldest restaurants (270 years in the same place). It's also one of the most famous due to its pole position on the Piazza, and the well-known story of its rivalry with the cafe across the square, Florian's. During the Napoleonic wars, one cafe housed the French military stationed in Venice, and the other was the hangout of the local, independence-minded elite. They both had orchestras, which sent out dueling musical messages. Both places still have outdoor orchestras that entertain a decidedly more downscale crowd, and both still gouge the customer with twenty dollar coffees. Since most people have sticker shock at the coffee in the cafe, few venture up to the restaurant above, which is too bad because it's quite good and its prices, though high, are no higher than the typical Venetian high-end place. But for the price you get loads of history, elaborate decor, and very solicitious service. Food is good but again pretty traditional. (Food-14, Decor-16, Service-17).