A Cuisine Without Locals
The shop attendant gave her another answer she didn’t want to hear. “It’s not just tourists here,” the woman snapped back. “People actually live here. I can’t go to every hardware store in the city just to find scissors.” Fulvia Larena, a curator and researcher, told me this story when I asked her how tourism influences her life in Venice, Italy—where she lives, the work she does, and the foods she eats. She was on the hunt for materials for an exhibition and in shop three encountered this woman on a hunt of her own. The moment struck Fulvia because “it shows how fragile basic services for residents have become.” Is a city still a city if it’s easier to purchase a package of penis-shaped pasta than it is scissors with which to open them?
More and more, Venice is a postcard, a destination, an Instagram location tag, or a wedding venue for billionaires, which makes it less and less a place of everyday life, a place where you can buy scissors and walk your dog and get your laptop fixed.
Venice has always been a balancing act. The city perches on timber pilings that were crafted centuries ago from logs that were ferried from the mainland to turn wetlands into solid ground. This is why the environmental historian Karl Appuhn calls it “a forest on the sea.” All cities are always collaborations between human hands and the lands and waters that host them. Overtourism is, of course, not unique to Venice; you could sing the same ballad about Barcelona or Bali, swapping one name for the other. But nowhere does this feel quite as fragile as here, where buildings rest on ancient trees, where floods are salty, and where tourists are thirsty for spritz and hungry for so much more than the Lagoon can grow.
I’ve moved to Venice twice. The first was because of an American woman who collected art. For two months, I hung coats, sold tickets, and told visitors in English, German, French, and my bad museum Italian not to touch the table or take photos with flash. Nearly ten years after my internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, I returned as a newly minted PhD grad, having won the postdoc lottery months after the COVID-19 pandemic’s first wave. A research fellowship at Ca’ Foscari University gifted me the city with barely a tourist in sight.
My research was to, well, study restaurants. To a certain extent, this did include eating, but only because I am a human who experiences hunger. I am also a food cultural historian, which means that my work does not focus on rankings or ratings, but, instead, on understanding restaurants in terms of politics and ecology, charting their webs of relations and power dynamics, their histories and tensions, and their entanglements with the flora and fauna they cast as food. The pandemic was, famously, a time when many eateries shuttered, and so my attention went beyond restaurants alone to consider the relationship between eating and the environment, which is to say how what we eat changes the world.
Ever since, I’ve been living a train ride away, in Munich, on the other side of the Alps. This is where Thomas Mann began his 1912 novella Death in Venice. Drawing from his time in the city during a cholera epidemic the year before, the story begins with Gustav von Aschenbach, an acclaimed author, circling a cemetery when eye contact with a red-haired stranger triggers a wild and wet vision that fires him to journey south to the coast, eventually directing him toward Venice and the island of Lido. It is a book about limerence and criminality, about overripe strawberries and underage boys, about a city that can’t handle the weather and a man who can’t handle the temperature.
The cemetery where Aschenbach experiences his vision—Nordfriedhof—is two metro stops from my apartment, and the airport bus stops south of its entrance. Whenever I leave Munich to fly elsewhere, and whenever I return home, the bus picks me up and drops me off in front of the cemetery. But I never fly to Venice; I always take the train, and yet the parallels are obvious. From a death in Venice to the death of Venice, for which airplanes, and mass travel, and insatiable appetites are in part to blame, so much so that the art historian Salvatore Settis provocatively titled his 2014 book If Venice Dies.
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In tourist imaginations, Italy, the nation, overshadows the many parts that make up its whole. This is what scholar Stephanie Malia Hom calls “destination Italy.” She traces this to 1864 when mass tourism arrived a mere three years after unification, meaning that “destination Italy” is nearly as old as the country itself. As she argues, “Italy’s national identity is inseparable from its identity as a tourist destination.”
Venice holds a privileged position in this imaginary. Out of the 68.5 million tourists who travel to Italy each year, around 30 million stop in Venice. They order pizza, photograph canals, and purchase glass trinkets, some made in Murano and many more in China. These actions match the behavior typical of theme parks, and are what lead Robert C. Davis and Garry R. Marvin to crown Venice “the first postmodern city, selling no product other than itself and its multiple images.” Venice’s primary product is Venice.
Everyone has heard that Venice is sinking. In Venice Is a Fish: A Sensual Guide, writer Tiziano Scarpa claims its architectural structures “might be able to survive. Instead, Venice will sink under the weight of all the visions, fantasies, stories, characters, and daydreams it has inspired.” Venice is equally crowded with tourists as it is with their imaginations, expectations, and appetites.
Venice has always welcomed traders and travelers, making it a key destination in the Grand Tour starting in the seventeenth century. UNESCO listed Venice and its Lagoon as a world heritage site in 1987. Bus tourism in the 1990s brought more tourists, then in the early 2000s, low-cost airlines and cruise ships escorted more still. Today, the city is clogged. So much so that in 2024, Venice introduced an “access fee” for certain days of the year, namely weekends and holidays. Day visitors must book online and pay a fee that fluctuates depending on demand. Many Venetians, however, are critical, accusing the measure of making Venice even more like a theme park.
Visitors who stay overnight are exempt from the daily entrance fee but must pay a city tourist tax. In 2019, Venice hosted nearly as many beds for tourists as it did for locals. Hotels, tourist apartments, and their kin offered over 49,260 beds—many of them in what once were homes—at a time the population was 52,143. On any given night, the city may host more guests than it has hosts, an example of overtourism. Outlining this concept, researchers Dario Bertocchi and Francesco Visentin describe how “overtourism occurs in a physical sense (too many people in one place or lack of control over visitor flow and regulation), as well as a psychological perception by residents (feeling hemmed in by tourism).” It is as physical as it is psychological. Tourists swell the city’s skinny streets and hoard its apartments.
Venice had its highest number of residents in 1951: nearly 174,800. A pharmacy near Rialto Bridge keeps track, and every time I visit, I make sure to pass it. In June 2021, it was 50,965. In February 2022, 50,228 and then 50,101 in May 2022. That same May, a number appeared on buildings and bridges across the city: 49,999 painted in the same style as Venetian house numbers. This street art activism forewarned a first in Venice’s history: the population was about to drop to below 50,000. As of 31 January 2026, the number was 47,652.
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Fewer locals, however, does not mean fewer restaurants. In fact, it means the opposite. As the number of residents in Venice continued to drop between 2008 and 2019, restaurants increased by more than 10 percent a year. Tourists are also why there is now so much pizza in Venice: Historically, this was not in the city’s culinary DNA, but by now some of it is even quite good.
January is when most restaurateurs take time off to renovate, travel, or rest. “Temporarily closed,” according to my smartphone’s map. I was in town the last days of the longest month of the year to present my book, and was messaging back and forth with Valeria Necchio, a food and travel writer, about where to eat. Pizza was one of our few options. “I was close to leaving the city,” she tells me while slicing through the cheesy dough. The summer before, her landlady had given her a heads-up months in advance and it still wasn’t enough time to find a place. But then she heard of a place through a friend (everything in Venice happens through friends) and was miraculously offered a five-year lease.
Valeria calls herself a new Venetian, meaning “someone who elected Venice as their hometown rather than being born here.” She grew up in a village forty minutes away, which technically belonged, first, to the province and, later, to the città metropolitana. As a child, Venice was a place she visited with her family. “In a way, despite the geographical and cultural proximity, we weren’t any different from any other day-tripper,” she admits. Her relationship to the city changed during the two years she spent researching her cookbook Veneto: Recipes From an Italian Country Kitchen. At this point, it had been years since she had lived in the region, her studies and work having taken her to Piedmont, London, and Australia.
“I’d like to think that was the time I began to know the city a bit better,” she recounts. “But even then, I never thought I’d live here. The idea had always felt foreign, or at the very least extravagant. I didn’t know anyone who had moved to Venice from elsewhere. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing people did.” Then, toward the tail end of the pandemic, she browsed a property-listing website and arrived, just as I was leaving.
A lot of Venetian restaurants cater to the type of day-trippers Valeria describes as “following the yellow arrows to the main attractions, enjoying a looping tour of the city, and leaving by dusk.” But unlike the attractions they are led toward by the arrows gesturing toward Rialto or San Marco, food is an impediment. Tourists cannot forgo eating; where and how they eat—whether they make a reservation weeks in advance, stumble upon a free table just as their hunger hits, or are poached by a person paid to wave around a menu—is always part of the experience.
As symbols of postmodern life, David Beriss and David Sutton argue that restaurants increasingly carry “out symbolic work previously reserved for monuments and parades, representing the ethos of cities, regions, ethnic groups and nations.” One part cultural artifact to one part tourist attraction. In Dining Out: A Global History of Restaurants, Katie Rawson and Elliott Shore write,“Eating at a local place is a hallmark of a certain idea of ‘good’ travel.” Avoiding tourist traps is, therefore, a badge of honor. Many travelers do not want to be seen as tourists. Instead, they want to camouflage and pass as locals. But this creates a paradox: “local places are local because they are fully of that place,” Rawson and Shore explain, “yet it is those same qualities that make them desirable to visitors as well.”
Although not always the case, generally the more tourists dominate a restaurant the less desirable it becomes to locals and, in turn, to other tourists. It is the classic tourist dilemma. Tourists seeking “local” experiences are running out of the very locals with whom they seek to rub tables.
This is exactly what travel writing recommends. Take, for example, a 2019 New York Timesarticle that advises: “When in Venice, Eat Like a Venetian.” It states that the vast majority of tourists will overpay for underwhelming food in restaurants populated only by other tourists. “But there’s one way to eat great Venetian food that’s thrilling, filling and authentic,” it promises: a bacaro, a Venetian bar that serves enough cicchetti—small bites—to cobble together a meal. Eating like a local is usually sound advice, or so it seems. But how does this work when the number of locals is shrinking? Setties writes about “A Venice without Venetians.” What does a local cuisine look like without Venetians?
Valeria believes that tourists “absolutely can” eat like locals. “Whether they want to is a different matter,” she adds. “There’s a romantic idea of how locals eat, which entails going to the market, indulging in lush yet effortless preparations, or subsisting on cicchetti alone. Both images are partially true, and neither is all that accurate; both stem from how the idea of a ‘Venetian local’ has been marketed to the outside world.” She tells me that to eat like a local in Venice, you need to do three things: access a kitchen, shed your romanticism, and when you do eat out, “rely on a handful of solid institutions for traditional dishes, punctuating that experience with simpler meals made up of snacks and a good deal of wine.”
The problem, in other words, is not tourism per se. It is about its numbers and the form it takes, which Valeria describes as “extractive.” As she explains, “it cannibalizes all other economic sectors,” dominating the employment, services, and shops that Venice offers. The criteria that Emiliano Guaraldo, a former colleague of mine, outlines what he calls cruise ship extractivism includes “the emergence of economic monocultures” in tandem with “developmentalism in which infrastructure and jobs are produced, but wealth is not redistributed,” as well as “a passive society striving for wealth accumulation produced mostly by rent.” This is why he diagnoses “Venice as a site of extraction not of raw materials or carbon fossils, but of its cityhood, natural environment, and social vitality.” A postcard, once again. Extractive tourism is what powers Venice to reproduce images of itself. It pushes out Venetians seeking employment outside of hotels and hospitality. It expels those hunting for long-term apartments. It casts the city as one to visit rather than one to move to, which is what Valeria had imagined.
Valeria admits that extractive tourism has not only impacted her ability to find a place to live and which streets she takes, but also the places she goes, like a wine bar she once loved that the rest of the world now also loves. But it hasn’t changed the way she eats, which suggests that to eat like a Venetian, you must cook.
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A native of Rome, Fulvia first moved to Venice for a master’s degree. While studying, she worked at Osteria al Ponte Storto, where Nicola Cecchi introduced her to samphire before it was trendy and gò, a fish local to the Lagoon, teaching her about seasonality, “not just for vegetables but for fish and cheese too—foods we don’t always think of as tied to a specific time of year,” she tells me. When she returned in 2022, she picked up where she had left off by working as the research coordinator of chef Marco Bravetti’s project Tocia! Cucina e comunità.
Fulvia would “almost say that it’s locals who eat like tourists.” She describes Venice’s restaurant scene as polarized. Quick bites occupy one end—your tramezzini and pizza slices, kebab shops and bacari, your “touristy trattorias that’ve been offering the same fixed repertoire for decades, often frozen in a version of ‘tradition’ that no one questions.” On the other end are restaurants of high quality, but with even higher prices.
“What’s missing is a middle ground,” Fulvia points out, “places where you can have a simple nourishing meal at a price you can afford.” Price matters, and Venice is populated by students and researchers, artists and cultural workers, hospitality jobs “that are rarely well paid.” Fulvia doesn’t think this is unique; it applies to Italy as a whole. “The rhetoric that positions tourism and restaurants as economic salvation—‘tourism is Italy’s oil’—,” she argues, “clashes with the reality of a fragile sector marked by high closure rates and precarious working conditions.”
Anthony Bourdain visited Venice in 2009 for the fifth season of No Reservations. By this point, travel reportage of Italy had become richly seasoned with culinary accounts, a tradition CNN continued with Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy. Bourdain goes “in search of the less-touristy side of Venice.” While he does not necessarily avoid romantic imaginations, Tucci exaggerates this further still. “Stanley Tucci plays a travel-show host,” Helen Rosner summarizes in her New Yorker review, and “Italy, with a bit of corsetry and airbrushing, plays itself.” Tucci proves novelist Donna Leon’s observation that “Every few decades, it seems Italy is ‘discovered.’” Searching for Italy asks: Was Italy lost? If not, then why does it need to be found? Following Bourdain’s footsteps, Tucci frames his Venice episode around the desire to eat like a local. “I want to eat what Venetians eat in the places they go to eat it in,” he narrates.
Fulvia points out that there is a limited presence of non-Italian cuisines, another consequence of Venice’s touristification. One morning, I was in town catching up with some friends who had had a long night out. Over coffee, one was filling us in on someone she’d taken home. Drinks had led to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. “Wait, there’s a Chinese restaurant in Venice?” I interrupted. “Not the point of the story, Sasha!” laughed another friend.
Orient Experience, which was opened by Hamad Ahmadai, who moved to Venice from Afghanistan, is on Tucci’s restaurant tour. “We know Italians eat Italian food,” Tucci claims, that is, if such a thing even exists. He mentions maybe you can find French or Japanese, but calls Orient Experience “a culinary United Nations” that demonstrates the openness of Venetians. Ahmadai explains that 80 percent of their customers are residents, meaning it’s an eatery that locals support.
Tucci also cooks, which would make Valeria proud (she even taught him how to make a radicchio dish for season two of Tucci in Italy). At Rialto Market, he meets a friend from Veneto who was the food advisor on Big Night, the 1996 film in which Tucci starred. The two buy ingredients for risotto al nero di sepia, even if Big Night stars a different risotto. In the film, Tucci plays Secondo, the manager of a restaurant called Paradise that he runs with his brother, Primo. In the Jersey Shore of the 1950s, Primo’s celebrated cooking is lost on Americans whose Italian culinary knowledge does not stretch beyond “red sauce” eateries peddling spaghetti and meatballs. A classic tale of how food stands at the forefront of cultural assimilation.
Risotto, at this point, was foreign. “Is this what I ordered?” asks a woman. Secondo reassures her it’s a special dish. “It is just not what I expected,” she sighs. “But I get a side of spaghetti with this, right?” “Well, no,” replies Secondo, an answer that lands with a thud. “There are no meatballs with the spaghetti?” “No, sometimes spaghetti likes to be alone,” he retorts. Secondo passes her spaghetti order to Primo. “She’s a criminal,” he insists. Primo’s refusal to assimilate to American culinary expectations is why Paradise must close.
Such tourist appetites are what Fabio Cavallari wants to avoid. Together with Pietro Consolandi, whom he met in art school, he founded Barena Bianca, a cultural organization and activist group. Adopting the barena, the Venetian salt marshes, as its emblem, their projects—from workshops with kids to edible art installations—illuminate the ecological and sociological issues the Venetian Lagoon faces. Fabio is also a chef who, interestingly, doesn’t consider tourism a problem per se. “I'd love an economy based on sleeping, eating, and drinking!” he tells me. “If Venice and Italy could sustain themselves solely on the idea of tourism, we would have a lot of fun. On the contrary, Venice is constantly nervous, stressed, and angry because of tourism.” A classic bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you scenario.
Fabio doesn’t see any difference between how Venetians and locals eat, saying, “News travels so fast that if a place is good, it's good for everyone—how it should be.” That said, the opposite is also true: “There is a touristic model of business, often adopted by Venetian entrepreneurs. A format to satisfy the demands of mass tourism with a great economic return at the expense of quality.” The likes of “standard menus linked to invented traditions (e.g., carbonara and spaghetti alle vongole everywhere), cheap materials, and high prices.”
Fabio has cooked his way out of these traps. He now works at ABC Zattere Arte Bar Cucina, hosted by the artistic foundation Scuola Piccola Zattere, “which aims to promote culinary research with attention to local raw materials.” Tired of the usual restaurant formats, Fabio “...was looking for something a bit more international with simple cuisine in a convivial space where I could spend time without completely immersing myself in the Italian culinary experience, often fueled by TV shows.” He tries to dodge the Venice that only an American television crew can find.
Before joining ABC Zattere, Fabio worked for nearly three years at Bar Ai Do Leoni, opened by Gialuigi Wahba in 2023 and located “at the ‘final destination’ for many tourists: Piazza San Marco.” A square where the only thing more impressive than its architecture is how much a restaurant can get away with charging for a coffee.
Among the tourists drinking cocktails that cost more than a train ticket and the eateries that cater to them by throwing in live music and waiters dressed in all white, is a bar where locals snack and drink and catch up. Fabio describes it as “a sort of bug in the system. A mistake that fortunately exists and whose strength lies in being the opposite of what it should be.” For some, “it's an alien place that for some absurd reason doesn't serve brioche, cappuccino, and baccalà; for others, it's an oasis of salvation from the tourist homogenization of Venetian locals.” This sounds like a classic contact zone, a concept coined by literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt to describe social spaces where cultures overlap, clash, and negotiate their often asymmetrical relations of power.
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In December 2024, the New York Times updated its “36 Hours in Venice” with a new guide based on two tips “to minimize your impact (and discomfort).” The first is to foray to “more remote neighborhoods and islands” and the second is to visit in winter, which “with its early darkness, famous fogs and reduced crowds—provides breathing room and deepens the mysteriousness of Venice’s narrow passageways.”
“What did you make of the Times story?” I messaged Valeria. “I left a comment,” she replied, turning my scrolling into a sprint to see what she wrote. A year later, I asked her about it again. Her first impression was that the author “had no idea what it would mean to write a piece for such a publication encouraging visitors to come during the single quiet period locals get throughout the year.” And to not just steal their quiet, but also (hot tip!) rent an apartment in a residential neighborhood. His description of Castello as “working class” especially niggled her, “as if that were meant to signal something edgy, up-and-coming, and cool. I found it not just classist but incredibly irresponsible, and the premise struck me as wrong. ‘To minimize your impact’: go to more remote neighborhoods, and visit in winter. I don’t see how either of these would minimize one’s impact the moment everybody follows the same instructions. His suggestion of renting an apartment is definitely not a way of doing so.” This brings up the answer everyone gives me when I ask what policies could better support Venetians: restrictions on short-term rentals.
Fabio believes that, although it might sound like a paradox, the policies that would better support Venetians would also protect tourism. It could lower environmental impacts and redistribute wealth, supporting “the diversification of commercial activities and the protection of workers” along the way.
This returns to price. Just as Fulvia keeps thinking about the woman in search of scissors, I keep coming back to the kind of life for which a good meal is shorthand. “What might sound like a minor complaint—not being able to find a simple, affordable meal—actually points to a broader issue of urban equity,” she tells me. The frictions and contradictions of aiming to eat like a local in a place where tourism threatens their very existence is a reminder that hospitality is a form of care work. “Hospitality often holds hands with its brother word hostility,” writes author Priya Basil. “Both are birthed from ghos-ti, their ancient Indo-European root, which meant host, guest and stranger.” Basil’s description echoes Jacques Derrida’s concept of “hostipitality.” He states that hospitality “carries its own contradiction,” that it “allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite.” The “undesirable guest” represents hostility—hospitality’s opposite. Restaurants everywhere, and especially in Venice, are entangled with these tensions.
Fulvia reminds me that “sooner or later all of us end up being tourists—and probably being disliked by some resident somewhere.” I like this idea of ghos-ti, of this trio of stranger, guest, and host and how we live our lives slipping between each one. Whether or not I once lived in Venice doesn’t really matter; every time I visit, I am now a tourist.
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I am writing this on a plane to Mexico City, a destination for which I caught the airport bus from the Munich cemetery that jump-starts Aschenbach’s trip, and a place where tourists are not necessarily the problem; instead, the problem is that more and more of them refuse to leave, living like kings off of their remote salaries paid in American dollars or euro. No longer a tourist but not quite a local.
None of the excuses I usually tether my travel to—research, a conference, a visit with friends or family—apply. The first time I met this city, so big it almost feels like a country of its own, was after my internship in Venice. A friend was living there and we spent the no-man’s-days between Christmas and New Year’s stuffing tortillas with nopales and cheese, mushrooms and red onions, and, with her boyfriend’s Mexican family, pushing the boundaries between when lunch ends and dinner begins.
This time, I have no reason I can rely on other than I am about to turn forty, and I’ve never had a charred avocado, and I want to walk until my feet hurt. Chase down blue corn quesadillas with mezcal, and have a language I don’t speak humble my tongue. So I have no business, really, being here other than I can be and want to. I could say it’s Easter. That my husband has never been. That he needs to see Frida Kahlo’s kitchen to understand my life’s aesthetic aspirations. Ghos-ti has one letter too many, and yet is haunted by specters, the kind that can sink dreams and cities and appetites if one is always a stranger—a guest—and never takes on the responsibility of also being a host.
L. Sasha Gora is a writer and cultural historian with a focus on food, the environment, and contemporary art. Since 2023 she has been running the "Off the Menu" research group at the University of Augsburg and in 2025 she published her first book, Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada. She prefers radicchio to roses and is always looking for an excuse to write about salt.
