Osteria Bancogiro, Venice

Now here, I'm afraid, is a classic example of style over substance. It's very nice to sit in a first floor brick vaulted dining room near the Rialto market, a babble of tourists drinking and taking cichetti below, the Christmas lights of the souvenir stalls twinkling across the campo. It's nice to gaze on a square white plate of salmon and fennel and pear, or a salad of duck ham, blue cheese and grapes. How about smoked tuna with aubergine and a pumpkin and cardamom sauce, or lamb with tarragon? They read well on the menu, they look good on the plate...if only they tasted of something!

I'm not trying to be unkind or harsh, really I'm not. There are lots of people on Tripadvisor who would say I'm an idiot, that the food here is the best they've ever tasted. (And four who would say I'm being too kind). So I'm prepared to think that we just came on a bad day. Maybe the chef had a cold and had lost his sense of taste. Maybe he had had his tongue cut out with a stiletto in a feud with with a gondolier over a beautiful woman. Well, you never know in Venice.

For whatever reason, he clearly wasn't tasting his food that day, and we paid over 100 euros for two plates each of mediocre dishes, eaten in beautiful but empty dining room. The wine was good though. Listen, don't let me put you off. Dozens of Tripadvisors can't be wrong (surely?), and I can be, easily, and often. But really, everything here was in very good taste; except the food.

Osteria Bancogiro, Campo San Giacometto, San Polo 122, under the porticoes, Venice, 30125

• 
  
• Tel 041 5232061
• 
  
• Osteria Bancogiro

Ca' Favretto, Venice

A room with a view of the Grand Canal: you'll pay a pretty price. But actually, the cost of our room at Ca' Favretto, which had this view from its window, was quite reasonable and the room was large and comfortable. Maybe it's because we were at the 'tradesman's' end of the canal, amongst the market and the post office rather than the galleries and palazzos and piazzas. But this is a convenient place to be: San Stae or Rialto Mercato vaporetto stops are just steps away, as is the Rialto bridge, and the traghetto across to San Marcuola gets you to Canareggio in minutes – if you master the art of standing up in a gondola.

The water laps and sucks at the hotel's canal frontage, and here is where you'll arrive if you have the taste to come by water taxi. Arrival on foot is a bit less salubrious, and more obscure, but not difficult if you're used to the anonymity of Venice's alleyways.

Breakfast was a good natured bun fight, in a room too small, or at least too narrow, for the number of guests, making for lots of polite giving way as people head for the fruit juice and coffee or return with a plate full of ham and cheese. A pity that, when we were there, it was too raw and cold to open the breakfast room doors out onto a balcony over the canal.


At night the noises from the canal were reassuring rather than disturbing. Vaporetti in the night and delivery barges in the early morning, bringing produce to the market. Not just a view, you see, but an ambient soundtrack too.


Residenza d'Epoca Ca' Favretto, Santa Croce, 2232 30135 - VENEZIA
Tel 041 52 41 768   


Hotel Ca' Favretto

Il Clandestino, Portonovo

Even in the shade of the forest it was hot. The searing midday sun pumped the resin through the pine trees until it sweated from the needles and the bark and the cones, filling the drowsy air with its soporific bitter-sweetness. Even the birdsong had grown lazy in the heat. The network of dusty tracks through the trees occasionally emerged into secretive coves of dazzling white rock and surf, each presenting a different, slightly surreal little scene. Here a deserted little beach, save for a bicycle which had been propped against a signpost, a small towel draped across the crossbar. No sign of its owner. A ramshackle jumble of boats and trailers, kayaks and sailboards filled the next beach. A man wearing a heavy mask was busy welding, creating flashes and sparks brighter even than the rock. Another, wearing only trunks, his skin tanned to the colour of chestnuts, sanded the fibreglass hull of a dinghy.

In the next cove we came across the appropriately named Il Clandestino; a laid back but acclaimed shushi (sorry, susci) and tapas restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Just a pale blue shack with a few tables and chairs outside, laid bare to the sun. A lone customer, a single man wearing a crisp linen suit and a panama hat sat at one of the tables sipping a glass of ruby red liquid and gazing out to sea. The man who served our drinks now lay on a large flat rock on the beach, apparently asleep. It was like a scene from a Buñuel film. We sipped the drinks we had ordered and felt a little out of place. And very hot, though it seemed uncool to sweat.

We later learned that Il Clandestino is owned by Moreno Cedroni, who holds two Michelin stars. Now if only we'd gone back for dinner...

Il Clandestino, Localita Baia di Portonovo 60100 Ancona

Tel 071 801 422

Il Clandestino

Osteria del Cinghiale Bianco, Florence

It was early October - the start of the mushroom season - and in the markets the air was heavy with their heady, earthy, almost other-worldy scent. Crossing the Arno as the sun set, silhouetting figures on Ponte Santa Trinita against a golden sky, we plunged into the shadows of Borgo San Jacopo, just as one might step across some unseen threshold and sink back in time. The light from the osteria's narrow entrance spilled onto the pavement like a beacon.

Inside, the dining rooms veer towards Tuscan pastiche (dark wood, white walls, old farm implements, pottery wine jugs), but hold short of overstepping the mark. When the service and the food kick in, there's no question that this is the real deal. The season's ingredients were very much top of the agenda here, as we were told "off menu" and with some pride that they had mushrooms – a plate of raw porcini was wafted regularly through the dining room – and persimmons, which featured in a dessert. Persimmons, it seems, are widely grown in this part of Italy.

The ubiquitous Florentine crostini with chicken livers was at its best here, and our first taste of fettunta was a revelation. I've no idea how simply bread and garlic and oil can taste that good. As befitting the restaurant name, we chose wild boar with grilled polenta and, as befitting the season, we also chose pork with wild mushrooms. Both were superb. So was the bottle of Classico we washed it down with.

It seemed that tourists, mainly, came here to be wrapped in a cosy Tuscan embrace for the evening, but it seemed too that the osteria offered no concessions, no compromises to this ready flow of business. The sunset that had escorted our arrival had turned to blackness when we spilled out onto the narrow street. The air was still warm, but a breeze caused a shiver on the surface of the river as we crossed it and picked our way through the city back to our hotel. This time-warp thing kicked in again. Hardly anything you walk past in Florence hasn't been around for centuries, and I felt a strange feeling of déja vu and timelessness as we wandered back to our hotel.

Okay, the Classico may have had something to do with it.

Osteria del Cinghiale Bianco, Borgo S. Jacopo, 43R, 50125 Firenze

Tel 055 215706

Osteria del Cinghiale Bianco

Relais Villa Antea, Florence

We were greeted first by a bat-eared and wire-haired young thing called Marta, who met us in the courtyard and we followed her into reception, where a young lady took over the formalities from this otherwise perfectly hospitable little dog. She had something of the theatre about her, this girl: when she showed us to our room she paused for a moment outside the unlocked door and said "Are you ready?", as though we should prepare ourselves for some life changing experience waiting on the other side of the door.

Life changing, no; but life enhancing, yes. Large room, parquet floors, comfortable bed, dressing area and thoughtful touches like a kettle and some tea and coffee. And a good value mini bar. A large bathroom and a huge shower. Every comfort. From our window we looked over a scene of leafy suburban Florence, and a few steps from the hotel the quiet Piazza della Vittoria went about its gentle daily business. A buffet of cheese and hams, bread and pastries in the first floor breakfast room set us up for our own gentle daily business of wandering and exploring the relaxed and sunny streets.

In two days we got to know the routes from the hotel into the main parts of the city and across the river: nowhere was more than a pleasant fifteen minute walk. In the end we didn't even need to look at the map. I always like it when you no longer have to look at the map: it either means you've settled in, or it's time to move on.

Relais Villa Antea, Via Puccinotti 46, 50129 Firenze

Tel 055 484 106

Relais Villa Antea

Pane e Olio, Florence

You can learn a lot about a town's eating habits by browsing its markets. You won't find much fish in Florence's Mercato Centrale, but stall after stall presents wonderful displays of meat: pork, beef, veal, chicken, guinea fowl, turkey, tiny milk fed lamb, suckling pig, rabbit, hare. There are trays of quivering offal: tripe, hearts, lungs, liver and other nondescript innards snuggle up alongside calves feet, nervetti and pale soft calves muzzles, peeled off as cleanly as if by a plastic surgeon. I'm not quite sure how you eat a calve's muzzle, or why. But it all goes to show that the Florentines like things meaty, and so it's not surprising that the city, a hundred miles or more from the sea, isn't exactly awash with fish restaurants.

We were a bit surprised then to find this little restaurant near the Ponte Rosso, and discover that the menu is almost exclusively fishy. It makes more sense when you get to know that the owners are from Liguria, and therefore accustomed to the abundance of the Ligurian coastline.

Outside is what you might call discreet. Inside is what you would definitely call small: we counted 18 covers, but that was only because a party of 12 was happy to share a communal table. It's a family affair, with mother in the kitchen and son front of house, and none the worse for that: a wordless intuition seemed to be at work to ensure seamless continuity between restaurant orders and kitchen output. Without asking, we began with breadsticks and slices of toast dunked in a little pot of anchovy mayonnaise. We ventured a little off the seafood track, but things maritime are undoubtedly this place's strong point. So the show was stolen from the various crostini of liver and tomatoes and mushrooms by the mixed seafood antipasti: a platter of fresh sardines and cheese, stuffed mussels, prawns, eel and pickled vegetables and unidentified (but delicious) little fishy tartlets. The trofie with pesto was bettered by the seafood lasagne. (No, I'd never had seafood lasagne before either, but I'd have it again here.) A bottle of Greco wine was a fitting accompaniment.

Service was careful, almost over-delicate, but efficient. The doors to the kitchen were thrown open throughout the evening, so the other, exclusively Italian, diners would have spotted, like me, the occasional use of a microwave to finish the food before serving. They didn't seem to mind, so neither did I.

I don't have a picture of Pane e Olio I'm afraid, so here's just a nice reflection in the Arno.

Pane e Olio, Via Faentina 2R, Ponte Rosso, 50133 Firenze

Tel 055 488 381

Pane e Olio

Osteria Santo Spirito, Florence - again

I have a soft spot for Santo Spirito; both the piazza and the osteria which takes its name. It's a gentle relief from the crowds around the Uffizi and the Duomo and the Ponte Vecchio. Six years after we were first here, we found ourself standing in the square again on this warm autumn day, breathing a sigh of relief that almost nothing had changed. Except that this time, this Sunday, the square and the streets around were filled with the stalls of a flea market: tressle tables of bric-a-brac, arrangements of old furniture, pictures (some good, some tacky), rails of second-hand clothes, boxes of records, glass cases of old jewellery, stacks of crockery, tablefuls of books...

It was lunchtime. In one corner of the piazza a drift of smoke rose enticingly from a mobile kitchen serving porchetta and fried polenta to a growing queue of market browsers (and, I think, traders too). In the other, only one table was left on the osteria's little terrace on the square. We couldn't resist, and were taking our seats almost before we knew it. Some little things were different: the tablecloths, the cutlery tied with dark blue ribbons, the bread now served in a colander. But the essence of the place remained the same as we remembered: young, rafish and lively. And though we ourselves felt distinctly less young, rafish and lively than we did even just six years ago, we were happy to join in.

We didn't overdo it. We ate pizza with salamino piccante and salad with celery, walnuts and gorgonzola dolce, dressed at the table with apple balsamic. And drank a glass of Orvieto each. And we knew (and breathed the second sigh of relief that day) that the osteria hadn't lost its touch.

Osteria Santo Spirito, Piazza di Santo Spirito, 16, 50125 Firenze

Tel 055 2382383

Still no website. Still doesn't matter. Still fantastic.