We met a couple in the bacaro Alla Vedova who said they were there because they were looking for a restaurant where they could eat good fish. The woman pinched her fingers together and gesticulated in the way Italians do when they are exclaiming about prices. I assumed she meant that they didn’t want to pay over the top for fish, but she meant quite the opposite! ‘How can you charge so little for the fish!’ the woman demanded. ‘How could you cook it for that?’ To her, the cheap price of fish in some of the restaurants they had seen meant that it must be frozen, and fresh fish is everything to an Italian.
When you make your descent into Venice by plane you can see the aquaculture in the lagoon where soft shell crabs, sea bass, sea bream and eel are all bred, and so fresh farmed fish and shellfish will always be on offer. Strangely for a city surrounded by water, smoked and dried fish have been on the menu for centuries in Venice too.