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Summary: I Live in Italy! This Book is GREAT!
Review: I live in Italy. I frequent Venice all the time. This book is accurate and consice and has great recommendations! Don't go to Venice without this book!
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Summary: Don't go to Venice without it!
Review: I plan to use this book every single day on our next trip to Venice! The authors describe many wonderful, non-touristy restaurants and bars, the kinds of places we've looked for but rarely found on our brief trips to Venice. It's clear they've spent lots of time and care researching this book to present the very best. The book is a real treasure! I hope it's the beginning of a series, because I'd like to have a book just like this for every major city we visit.
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Summary: An essential guide to Venice, with food and food for thought
Review: I was not supposed to read this book; it is a guide and one is supposed to look it up just for suggestions and tips. But I got caught into actually reading it. Written with flair and panache by two experienced travellers and Venice lovers, the book is also very well published, with excellent graphics and easy to read text, good use of colours, economic in space, in short: delightful. Don't leave home (for Venice, or even for a read at the beach...) without it.
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Summary: A food guidebook Better than the rest!
Review: I'm a friend of Shannon and Ruth's, but because I've shared many meals with them in Venice I can confirm that their restaurant and baccari reviews are completely on target! Shannon lived in Venice for a year and returns regularly, and Ruth spends two months a year there - these women know their stuff. I've always been very happy with their dining recommendations, even before they wrote a book together. When they say "Don't eat upstairs at Fiaschetteria Toscana," I know they've had that unfortunate experience already, and want to spare you a disappointing meal. When they say "Go to Harry's, sit at the bar and order Prosecco - NOT champagne!" I'm confident that the Prosecco will be perfectly wonderful, and a reasonable alternative to a high priced cocktail at that legendary establishment. I've already ordered several copies of this book for my friends traveling to Venice. "Chow! Venice" is like a having a good friend along on the journey - one who knows all the Best places!
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Summary: This Book Would Have Improved My First Visit To Venice
Review: It was our first visit to Venice as tourists. We were naive. We were grateful for restaurants with "Tourist" menus. We ate very poorly. We left Venice that first time, convinced that it offered the worst food in Italy.
Had I had Chow!Venice then, it would have been a completely different story!
Because of Shannon and Ruth's advice and recommendations on the SlowTrav.com Italy message board, that disasterous trip will never be repeated. And now all that great advise is in this fun and easy to read guide.
Chow!Venice is a directly written, no-nonsense guide to eating like the Venetians instead of the Tourists. We will take with us on every future visit.
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Summary: Reliable, but limited info on eating in Venice
Review: Many travellers regard good Venetian food as an oxymoron. They needn't do so with this guide. Clearly the authors love Venice and Venetian cooking. Each of the 4 dinners we enjoyed on a recent trip to Venice were as described in Chow! Venice. Our only dining disappointment occurred when we decided to trust another source.
The authors provide accurate, albeit limited, information on the 40-some restaurants they cover, including decent directions on how to find the establishment. They sometimes tend to be a little over-the-top in their platitudes, they cover only a fraction of the hundreds eaterys in the Lagoon, they fail to include info on annual closings, and the size of the book makes it harder to tote along than it needs to be.
Still, Chow!Venice is more up-to-date than Fant or Plotkin, and more reliable than Gustafson. If you're looking for single guide to dining in Venice, consider this one.
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Summary: By no means best in class
Review: My wife and I are just back from three weeks in Venice. We brought this book along, hoping that it would be as useful as Emily Wise Miller's wonderful "The Food Lover's Guide to Florence." It was not. We found the quality of the recommendations to be quite spotty: some excellent, some definitely not. We found the "variety" of cuisines recommended to be a little over the top (TexMex and margaritas in Venice?). Worst, by the end of our stay we found that only one of our half dozen or so favorite restaurants was in "Chow, Venice!": the selection here is not very reliable.
We had much more success with Michela Scibilia's "A Guide to the Eateries of Venice". Michela is that rarest of persons: a native Venetian between the ages of 25 and 60. She wrote the first edition of this book in 1992 (in Italian), as a way of guiding friends from elsewhere in Italy away from the tourist traps and towards her favorite places to eat. The book has been updated with a third edition and an English translation in the last few years. While it's not available through Amazon (fix that, you guys! ;) ), it's available in many bookstores in Venice, including those at the Doge's Palace and the Correr Museum in San Marco Square.
"Chow, Venice!" is not without merit as a secondary resource. We used its food glossary quite often. It recommends a few more "Inexpensive" restaurants than "The Eateries of Venice" (though we found buying a smaller meal at a more expensive place was a more interesting way of going "Inexpensive"). If you like great food, though, you'll definitely want to buy a copy of the Scibilia guide, even if you're only going to be in town a few days.
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Summary: My armchair trip to Venice.
Review: Reading Ruth Edenbaum's "Chow!, Venice!" was a delicious virtual journey, transporting me from the Midwestern plains to the musical canals of Venice, Italy. The authors' vivid descriptions helped me to experience the sights and sounds of this romantic city and smell the fragrant bouquet of the Italian cuisine without ever having to leave the comfort of my favorite chair-yet leaving me longing for more and longing to be in Venice.
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Summary: What a breath of fresh air!
Review: The authors Shannon Essa and Ruth Edenbaum have done a marvelous job of making Venice seem actually accessible to a newcomer as well as the returning visitor. In a city where it's easy to be completely overwhelmed and feel herded into expensive tourist traps, they guide you to both casual eateries and more elevated dining pleasures with good directions by neighborhood, an honest description of the ambience, and hints about some of the special treats. From a friendly primer about eating customs and peculiarities, to specific comments about the establishments, not only do you start feeling hungry, you just know that they have taken great care to try each one and describe it as they found it. This is a guide which DOES NOT INCLUDE places they didn't like, a quality which is rare indeed in food guides. In addition, there is a section on places to buy food, in case you have rented an apartment, as well as some nifty non-food shops that they found special. This book is the next best thing to having Shannon and Ruth with you -- helpful, straightforward, gracious. You can tell they want you to love your time in Venice, and with this book, you will!
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Summary: Not too much, but what's there is cherce
Review: This book contains information and reviews on a selection of restaurants in Venice, in all areas of the city. The prices are mostly moderate (for Venice) and the information provided is very helpful, including very specific walking instructions. The book is an excellent supplement to restaurant information in other guidebooks, especially since that information sometimes appears to be repeated year after year without much updating.
The reviews in Chow Venice are obviously a labor of love.
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