Review of Venissa Wine Resort 4*

The service from entry to exit is polished, friendly, multilingual, instructive, precise, and professional. All team members execute their tasks nearly flawlessly. Patrons can spend anywhere from 200 euros to 1000 on a multi course meal, with the bulk of the cost in the higher ranges going to rare and fine vintages, as is the case in any great restaurant. The Venissa complex is a concept in art, architecture, history, ethnobotany, hospitality, and cuisine. As with any Michelin starred restaurant, there are the obligatory "free" courses which include amuse bouche, palate cleansers and post desserts. The bread baked at high temperature of farro integrale which comes scorched from the wood oven to the table with perfect sweet butter is a revelation. It's the best bread I have been served in a restaurant and the timing of the loaf to the reservation has to be fairly perfect. I don't think we were supposed to devour the first one so quickly but a second one came to tide us over. Venissa looks at the lagoon, the land, and the various ways of preserving, storing and cultivating the foodstuffs of the Veneto through the lens of the tiny and usually overlooked island of Mazzorbo. What does this mean? It means that herbs and greens used in the dishes come from the field that stretches out from the modernist haute farmhouse with glass walls. It means that the wine from the vines in the fields is the only existing plot of Dorona di Venezia, a grape that is rooted in the diaspora of Romans who settled the foetid swamps out of which La Serenissima would rise (never mind that Mazzorbo and many of the other islands like Murano and Burano, most of them only recently integrated into the Venentian fold still see themselves as independent and culturally unique). It was thought lost, until one vine was identified on a agricultural island forgotten by time. The process is relentlessly experimental, delving into antiquity and imagination, but the results are engaging and intriguing wine experts as well as rediscovering a lost recipe through trial and error. The bottles are priced well out of range of a diner on a modest budget, and who expects to pair the courses differently, but the vineyard is small and the investment is great. I have drank so-called experiments in other areas of Europe and I am confident that those who can afford to support this venture should, and that the sommelier will pair these flavour profiles with expertise and a bit of verve. The food. There is fish, there is duck, there are game meats, but overall the lagoon and the land are the twin engines of a meal that is once laden in the classical traditions of Italy, but yet magically light and airy with the bubbling up of a youthful playfulness that has long evaded much of Italian cooking. The small filets of sole wrapped like turbans with delicate saucing were the best iteration of a fish that saw its heyday on the Titanic I could have imagined. They were cooked to creamy perfection. Just past a bit raw in the center filet. This fact made even more remarkable by the fact that they are the size of large thimbles. Getting this dish right in texture and temperature is not a simple task. The tortellini with a local weed that tasted vaguely of clean mud and bitter greens and local pine nuts sang. The muddy taste, like the clay of the cleanest creek marries to the impeccable sophistication of the tiny long and local pine nut, balsam cream, and staccato finish. These have not long been away from their tree. Then, the pillowy pasta with sharper cheese and the whole dish held together by a filament of cream sauce. The dish is ostensibly a nod to pesto, yet is is not a pesto. It speaks to caccio e pepe, yet is is nowhere near it. The cream sauce when eaten on the naked pasta suggests where Alfredo sauce should have gone but didn't, and this is surprisingly a very good thing. These are the ways in which the familiar becomes the unexpected. But this is the right way to push cooking forward in a place where tradition is still very much a passion: with elegance and restraint.