Nan had invited us to join her and some friends at Michelin Guide listed Trattoria Gatto Nero on Burano. Ken declined, but I was to meet her at noon on the Fondamente for a water taxi pick up.

Oh–I got ahead of myself. I forgot we had a lovely little walk in the morning with our traditional stops at Bisiol for some prepared foods and a great coffee at Puppa. We noticed some changes on Strada Nuova and that the vino sfuso place had moved to the corner, with a larger selection of bottled wines. We didn’t go into the new shop, but we will:

So, I met Nan and we jumped into the water taxi. We are a party of ten. Super wordly people from a financial stratosphere with which I am familiar only in books, movies and TV. They reminded me a lot of the family in Succession, except a lot nicer. Anyway, the mom who was my age, had made this very hard to get reservation months ago and I was excited to eat there. They, of course, had been there many times before.

We checked out the back garden while we waited about 3 minutes to go to our table:

And this is a classic kitchen with big bags of freshly made pasta:

The food! Nan and the daughter ordered for everyone and Nan deftly handled the various and perfectly paired white wines, flowing generously throughout the meal. We started with an array of super fresh and simply prepared seafood: scallops, each in its shell, razor clams, little vongole veraci/clams, raw scampi and my favorite, moeche, which are small soft shell crabs, fried in a very light batter. Every single bite was perfect and so Venetian. The famous dish of Burano is the risotto di Gò (tiny fish from the mud of the lagoon) which is very complex to prepare. I had never had it before and it proved to be wonderful–the al dente rice, full of sea flavor without being fishy:

This was followed by a house mae tagliolini with shrimp and asparagus. The presentation was gorgeous and the dish was top notch:

I had never eaten a raw zucchini flower before. They were good!

So full by then, but somehow I found a wonderful small grilled sepia on my plate and ate it.

There was coffee, cookies and a wonderful dessert wine after all that. You don’t want to know how much it cost! And who was going to carry me home?

Somehow we made it back to a new water taxi and home. Ken had had his own adventure walking all over Venice and our reunion was sweet. I really needed a walk and so we took one. I never ate any dinner–just drank water all evening. I did get this one pretty shot on the canal we always cross by our apartment:

Wow! What a day!