It doesn’t happen very often that you sink your spoon into a micro landscape made of chocolate and hazelnut crumble, chocolate mousse and ice cream, creamy coffee, seaweed and samphire, macho tea powder (and seasonally enriched with sea purcelane and radish flowers)… Isn’t that a pretty exclusive sensory experience? Sweetness, salinity, and balsamic notes melt in your mouth. And the mind runs to visually recreate those extensive clayey and muddy lands that look dense and dark like chocolate and which are called locally ‘barene’. They can be found in the Venice Lagoon.
they are sometimes submerged, sometimes emerging from the water, with their medley of ‘velme’ (mud flats) and halophilic/halophytic vegetation, exactly the same that we can taste, crunchy yet yielding and smooth in our mouths, blended with creaminess and freshness. So we discover a tasty terroir/milieu of biodiversity reproduced on the plate. And we reflect on the geographic and physical importance of those timid and silent guardians of the lagoon’s survival, where the birds take shelter and which give the dessert its name. Threatened by man and by the waves of boats, ‘barena’ is revered at the tables of the restaurant Local (pronounced local in the English version or even better with an accent on the a – locàl!). Because this is the home of farm to fork, but purely Venetian in style ;-)
