How we snagged a table at one of Venice’s best seafood restaurants without a reservation during high season.
Words and photography by Liani Solari
Lucky for us, my mother speaks Italian with a foreign accent.
After emailing Trattoria al Gatto Nero (Black Cat Restaurant) to request a lunch reservation but not hearing back, we take a chance and just turn up on the doorstep of this renowned family-run restaurant on the Venetian island of Burano. Mind you, turning up is no spur-of-the-moment thing.
We melt on the 65-minute vaporetto ride that departs the ferry stop near Venice’s Bridge of Sighs, the waterbus heaving under the weight of a high-season glut of hot, sweaty tourists. On our first trip back to Italy since the pandemic, it’s clear this small island in the Venetian Lagoon is just as swamped with summer tourists as Venice proper. I imagine the giant hand of tourism holding a jug overhead, pouring a steady stream of visitors into the streets and canals lined with the multicoloured houses of fishers and lacemakers.
Fortunately for us, Burano’s Bovo family, having just returned from holidays, has decided to go with the season and scoop up some of the flow, opening the door to their sky-blue Trattoria al Gatto Nero for the first time this summer. However, when we arrive, the canalside tables are full and there’s no guarantee we’ll get in for lunch, especially without a reservation.
Managing people and expectations with adeptness, front-of-house extraordinaire Massimiliano Bovo (aka general manager and son of chef Ruggero Bovo) is a welcome apparition. My mother (an Australian Italophile) asks him for a table for two in Italian. Massimiliano can accommodate us in 40 minutes, he responds in Italian at a speed usually reserved for native speakers. It’s faster than my heat-affected neurons can process, but my mother successfully wrangles her covid-rusty Italian to explain that we’d tried to book a table via email.
And that’s when our luck changes. “Wait. I’ll get rid of some people,” Massimiliano says, before removing his tongue from his cheek. Leaning in, he confides that the emails on the family’s return from holidays were “too much”.
It’s 33 degrees Celsius in the shade and we’re melting faster than a toddler’s gelato. We inch our way into the restaurant’s narrow doorway, where the cool blast of air conditioning is a godsend, sucking in our bellies as the waiters squeeze past, their hands full of plates.
“I’ll get you a prosecco,” Massimiliano announces, to our surprise. Within minutes, he appears with two perfectly chilled glasses of this local sparkling wine. We grin like cats that got the cream.
We’ve barely taken two sips when Massimiliano shows us to a table inside. We can have the table nearest to the air conditioning because he likes Australians, he says in English. We can’t believe our luck, although I suspect it’s less about where we’re from and more about being foreigners attempting to speak with him in his native tongue.
“How do you know we’re Australian?” I naively ask, thinking we’d done a pretty good job of communicating in Italian (I’d even asked my mother to double-check Google Translate’s grammar before I sent the email in Italian). “Your accent,” he says. And with those two words he puts us at ease. We can stop feeling self-conscious about being tourists and simply enjoy the hospitality.
Settling in at one of the five tables in the restaurant’s front room, we admire the walls hung with framed seascapes and scenes of lagoon life. The star, though, is the tableware. Burano’s palette is reflected in the customised plates depicting the island’s colourful buildings (spot the trattoria overlooked by a black cat on a lamppost) and the brightly speckled Murano glasses with dents for ergonomic handling.
Normally we’d rather be eating alfresco and people-watching, but nothing can match dining like a local in this unpretentiously elegant indoor setting. The tourists seated by the canal or filing past the restaurant don’t know what they’re missing out on. We feel like we’re in on a local secret.
We’re messing with the system when I order a first course – spaghetti alle vongole (spaghetti with clams) – for my main and my mother skips the first course and orders scampi alla griglia (grilled scampi) from the second courses. But our lovely waiter, who also accommodates us in English, doesn’t seem to mind. The days of feeling obliged to order every course on the menu are long gone and our hosts don’t push us. Besides, we have limited time. If only this were a progressive family meal and we could linger over the seafood-led menu… but today we’re tourists bound to the ferry timetable.
Behind us, the bar clad with upcycled wooden wine boxes hints at Massimiliano’s curated list of offerings from 10 of Italy’s regions, with an emphasis on Veneto and its northern neighbours. The wines are available by the bottle, but our waiter says I can order by the glass; he’ll see what’s open. Would I like red or white, fruity or dry? “Bianco secco,” I reply, happy to leave the decision-making to him.
Returning with a bottle of Orto di Venezia, he tells me this locally produced white wine is made from grapes grown near the water, so it has a slightly salty quality. Delving a little deeper, I later discover the vines are cultivated in the lagoon on the island of Sant’Erasmo, ‘Venice’s vegetable garden’, the terroir contributing to Orto’s minerality. Magnums of the wine, which is a blend of the malvasia istriana, vermentino and fiano grape varieties, have been aged under water in a sunken sandolo (traditional flat-bottomed rowing boat), but today I’m having a glass from a 750ml bottle. The waiter pours me a sample – it’s deliciously medium-bodied and refreshing – and assures me it goes beautifully with seafood.
When my dish arrives, the wine pairing makes perfect sense. The spaghetti is al dente and the proportion of pasta to the locally sourced bevarasse clams is just right – not a huge pile of spaghetti with a scattering of shellfish. As much as I love garlic, it’s subtle enough not to overpower the flavours of the sea. Everything is balanced – and generous, too, with my mother noting there’s no skimping on the scampi.
It’s refreshing that there’s no hint of the aloofness that often characterises wait service in upmarket restaurants in Italy. After we pay the bill, it’s not deal done, va via (on your way), our waiter taking the time to chat with us about our mother-and-daughter travels.
Massimiliano returns too, nodding knowingly when my mother tells him it was an Australian friend who recommended his restaurant. Trattoria al Gatto Nero is globally renowned, which means there’s always the risk of it becoming too much, too big, he says. “It’s a double blade, but you must know how to use the double blade, to be smart,” he states, employing that Italian superpower: the ability to bring everything, even metaphors, back to la cucina.
I don’t recall ever asking for a doggie bag in Italy and today is no exception. (We’re at the Black Cat, after all.) We’ve polished our plates clean. (Ooh, how I’d love to take one home.) But there is a takeaway: You don’t need to be fluent in the local language. In fact, you could be treated to a very local experience because you speak Italian like a foreigner.
© Liani Solari
Posted 19 January 2025.
The writer dined at her own expense (and accomplished her mission to eat her body weight in spaghetti alle vongole during a week in Venice).
Liani Solari 