I am excited to bring you our top five tastes in Venice, the gateway to the Veneto and the Prosecco Hills (see article). The following recommendations are from five World of Mouth experts with true expertise in Venice and the surrounding area. Among their favourite picks are some of the best local eats, aperitivo places, contemporary food and fine- dining restaurants in Venice so that you can be confident that you will not waste a single meal time once in this beautiful corner of Italy.

Venice is a splendid city in many senses and for more than a thousand years it has been a hub for trade and culture and also good food and drink. It is a city with plenty of tourists, so if possible it’s good to time your visit outside the most hectic tourist season and travel during the European winter months between November and March. Among the places recommended here you’ll find the mandatory aperitivo place to start the afternoon, either with the iconic Bellini cocktail at Harry’s Bar or a glass of wine and a sandwich at Al Mercà, a typical Venetian bacaro (wine and snack bar) near the Rialto food market. As Venice consists of more than a hundred small islands and much of the local cuisine is based on seafood, a great place to enjoy the bounty of the sea is at the family-run local favourite Trattoria Al Gatto Nero on Burano island. For a true culinary adventure into the surrounding lagoon, its catch and the farming on the numerous islands, Venissa is the restaurant to visit to understand how the local produce can be used in a sustainable way to create some of the most delicious experiences in Venice.

All of our World of Mouth experts bring their knowledge and unique perspective to you of their personal experience at these restaurants and I can guarantee you that you’ll find their opinions and suggestions worth the visit. At World of Mouth we’re introducing a new era in restaurant guides: an app driven by a rapidly growing global community of passionate food lovers who are committed to creating the world’s most credible and transparent restaurant guide, without advertising and mediocre restaurants paying for their visibility.

I founded the guide five years ago with my colleague, entrepreneur Saku Tuominen, in Helsinki, Finland. The aim of the guide was, from the very beginning, to provide the ultimate insider information by food lovers for food lovers and to highlight great restaurants of all categories, from street food to fine dining.

Today, our team manages an app with more than 100,000 users and 15,000 personal restaurant recommendations to 2,300 destinations globally. Users can access personal recommendations from both experts and fellow food lovers, filter them based on various criteria such as location, cuisine and price range, save their favourite spots to wishlists and create collections to plan their trips. World of Mouth has no advertisements, paid visibility or ratings and experts are barred from recommending their own places.

We have more than 700 hand-picked, invited experts in our community and new ones are joining daily. I hope you’ll head over to the World of Mouth app to join our vibrant community. Meanwhile, please enjoy these fantastic tastes of Venice, Italy.

Venissa
Fondamenta di Santa
Caterina, 3, 30142 Venezia VE

Venissa is among my five favourite restaurants in Italy – it enchants me every time for some simple reasons. Its environmental cuisine, which enhances the close relationship between the dishes and the surroundings, makes me feel as one with the Venetian lagoon. The wise and surprising use of herbs and vegetables transforms the plates into small masterpieces of taste. Also, fabulous surroundings, silence, tranquillity, the colourful houses of Burano and that scent of salt mixed with humidity instinctively reminds me of being in one of the most evocative, fragile and precious places on this planet. Margherita Bentivogli, Foodie, Milan

Al Mercà
Campo Bella Vienna,
213, 30125 Venezia VE

Great bacaro (food and wine stall) very close to the Rialto market, with great vibes, lots of locals, good value wine by the glass, tasty simple small bites, polpette and salumi. Bruno Caseiro, Chef & Restaurant Owner, Portugal

Stappo-Enoteca con Cucina
Calle Longa, 2166,
30135 Venezia VE

Stappo is run by Venetian natural-wine veteran Diego Carraro and his Canadian partner Mathilde Lambert. Diego used to work at Vino Vero, the first Venetian natural-wine bar that created somewhat of a movement in Venice, which now boasts plenty of places focussing on organic and biodynamic wines, among them Stappo. In one of those tiny alleys in San Polo, just a few minutes’ walk from the Rialto fish market, Diego and Mathilde run not just a cool wine shop and bar, but also a bistro/trattoria where they serve simple, but delicious, done- to-perfection dishes such as sardines a la saor, marinated anchovy salad, burnt eggplant in tomato salsa, grilled peppers, creamy burrata, butter pasta with anchovies and lemon or just a generous board of salumi. Kaja Sajovic, Food Writer, Ljubljana

Trattoria Al Gatto Nero
Via Giudecca, 88,
30142 Venezia VE

A wonderful family-run restaurant with stunning seafood and a great wine list. In a city where both food and service can at times be sketchy, this is a place where you can just leave everything in the hands of Massi and his team. Andreas Viestad, Food Writer & Traveller, Oslo

Harry’s Bar
Calle Vallaresso, 1323,
30124 Venezia VE

Giuseppe Cipriani, owner of the legendary Harry’s Bar in Venice, invented carpaccio and the Bellini. The original carpaccio was developed by Cipriani, who wanted to create a special dish for a regular customer because her doctor had advised her not to eat cooked meat. Cipriani named his creation after the famous Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio, known for his bright red and white tones, who was the subject of a major exhibition in Venice in 1950. It is simply indescribably good and you have to try it. Cornelia Milde, Writer, Vienna

World of Mouth is an independent restaurant guide powered by a global community of experts. Find pizza joints loved by locals in New York, the hottest new eateries in London, the best street food in Singapore and much more – already 17,000 recommendations in 3,000 destinations. worldofmouth.app