On the Waterfront, Fresh Fish & Great Wine
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
VENICE, Italy — At 54, Cesare Benelli is a handsome, solidly built man with a full head of white curling hair who exudes an animated warmth. A chef by trade and a former amateur boxer, Mr. Benelli is a martyr to a cause that other, more cynical, sorts in this most touristed of cities likely consider a folly.
As the chef-owner of a 40-seat restaurant called Al Covo (the lair), Mr. Benelli has a cause that is hairshirt-simple: serving the freshest fish imaginable with deference to Venetian tradition, accompanied by some of Italy’s (and France’s) greatest wines chosen with no deference at all to conventional taste.
Elsewhere — which is to say on terraferma, as the Venetians refer to the mainland — Mr. Benelli’s efforts would be easier and certainly less expensive. Everything in Venice seems doled out a tablespoon at a time, from the hotel laundry bags tossed one by one onto waiting boats to cases of wine wheeled on hand trucks through the side streets, like bread crumbs carried off by ants.
Tourists consequently pay some of Europe’s highest hotel prices and withstand some pretty steep restaurant tabs, especially given the you-won’t-be-back insouciance about quality. Venetians themselves pay significantly less, as the locals typically get a sconto, or discount, in restaurants that can be as much as a third to half off.
Mr. Benelli is a man in perpetual high gear. “It’s getting so much harder to find really fresh fish,” he said, somewhat unconvincingly, as his guest mentions Venice’s famous fish market near the Rialto bridge. “Oh sure, we have plenty of fish here in Venice,” he said affably. “But where does it come from? Norway. Spain. Fish farms. Those fish come from anywhere and everywhere but here.”
Since fish is the soul of both Venice’s and Mr. Benelli’s cooking, the primacy and freshness of the raw material — which is served raw or crudo at Al Covo in the case of scampi and scallops — are his obsession. “People don’t believe what it costs to get the kind of quality I look for,” he said. “So now what I do is post my invoices from my suppliers right here in the restaurant. You can see what I pay and, more importantly, where the fish comes from.”
With that, he hustled over to the invoice shrine, which indeed prominently holds a sheaf of bills to show a visitor the price — or rather, prices — of his integrity. “Look at this,” he said. “See where it says ‘Pescato’ in parentheses? That means it was caught by a fisherman in the wild. That it’s not ‘Allevamento,’ or farmed.”
With that out of the way, the talk turned to wine. Mr. Benelli loves wine and, like his fish, he chooses it with curatorial care. “I learned about wines in America, not Italy. I worked as a food and beverage manager at a Hyatt hotel in Austin, Texas, from 1979 to 1985. So I got to taste all sorts of wines. Really, it was a terrific education.”
It was there Mr. Benelli met his Texasborn wife, Diane, who makes the desserts at Al Covo and greets guests in Texas-accented English and rapid-fire Italian. (“She even has a Venetian accent,” one local admiringly commented upon hearing Ms. Benelli’s Italian.)
“After I started Al Covo in 1987, I took a sommelier course here in Italy, eventually getting a certificate after passing the professional-level course. Whether that’s really worth anything…” He shrugged, leaving the matter hanging in the air. “It was during that time that I developed my own point of view.”
Mr. Benelli’s “own point of view” on wine is consonant with his feelings about fish. “I try to choose wines that represent their terroirs in the most profound way possible. I don’t care about whether producers use oak or not. But I do care about whether they use indigenous wild yeasts rather than cultured yeasts. I do care about whether they add enzymes during the fermentation, use concentrators or reverse osmosis or any other form of artificial concentration.”
According to Mr. Benelli, at least 80% of all the wines in Italy use some kind of technique to concentrate wine. “Wines are getting too heavy, too rich,” he said. “You drink a glass, but you don’t want any more than that. There’s too much alcohol, too much extract in many of today’s wines.”
Mr. Benelli’s wine list, which changes weekly, has 192 wines, a number of which are annotated with a heart symbol signaling “wines that, in our judgment, we appreciate for their uniqueness.”
“Those are the wines I really love,” Mr. Benelli explained. “They’re really unusual wines, which, I have to say, may not be to the conventional taste.”
Among them are Jacque Selosse Brut Initial Champagne (“Not everybody’s idea of French Champagne, but extraordinary”); Josko Gravner ribolla gialla and his blend called Breg (“Gravner is a genius. The wines can be shocking even, but I love them.),” and Recioto di Gambellara from La Bianacara, a sweet dessert wine made from dried garganega grapes grown in the Soave district.
Almost everything on the list, it should be noted, is exceptionally well priced and, by Venetian standards, downright cheap.
“I choose wines that are not ‘perfect,'” he said. “Often, they’re not very well known, which is great because that way the prices are lower, as we’re not paying for marketing. And I like to offer indigenous wines that my customers won’t usually see. Americans really like that,” he added. “You guys are great students of wine. Not like my Italian customers,”he said with a grin, rolling his eyes. “They don’t know anything.”