Food Highlights
🏆 Favorite Bite
Mortadella tramezzini with pistachio pesto
🌟 Most Unique Dish
Venetian style squid
What to Expect
🥪 Taste Venetian Cicchetti
Sample a variety of cicchetti — Venice's famous small bites — while discovering one of the city's most important food traditions.
👉 Choose Your Favorites
Rather than everyone receiving the same bite, several stops offered different options to choose from, with our guide providing recommendations along the way.
🥖 Mortadella & Pistachio
Our favorite bite was a fantastic mortadella sandwich with pistachio pesto — a combination we'd happily eat again immediately.
🦑 Try Something Different
Among the more adventurous tastes was squid, giving us a chance to experience how closely traditional Venetian cuisine is connected to the lagoon.
🌊 Food Shaped by the Lagoon
Learn how Venice's unique geography, history, and relationship with the lagoon helped shape the foods traditionally eaten throughout the city.
🍷 Plenty to Taste
With multiple stops and plenty of cicchetti along the way, we thought this tour offered an impressive amount of food and an excellent value.
Our Experience - Venice Street Food Tour
We hadn't originally planned on taking this tour at all. Our flight arrived in Venice earlier than expected, giving us some unexpected extra time, so we booked the Venice Street Food Tour on a whim. It turned out to be an awesome way to kick off our time in the city — although, to be fair, pretty much everything we did in Venice ended up being incredible!
Our guide, Ana, was fantastic and introduced us to the world of Venetian cicchetti: small bites traditionally enjoyed throughout the city. One thing we particularly liked was having choices at several of the stops. Ana would explain the different options and give us her recommendations, but we could decide what sounded best to us rather than everyone automatically receiving the same thing.
And there was plenty to choose from. We made multiple stops and sampled a variety of cicchetti, with our favorite bite being a mortadella sandwich topped with pistachio pesto. Our most unique taste was squid, which tied perfectly into one of the most interesting parts of the tour — learning how much Venetian cuisine has been shaped by the lagoon and the ingredients available around it.
Ana also helped us understand what actually makes Venetian food Venetian. One particularly useful lesson was that pizza and pasta aren't traditionally the foods that define Venice. While you'll certainly find restaurants serving both throughout the city, she explained how many of those places cater primarily to visitors, while cicchetti and seafood traditions offer a much closer introduction to the city's own food culture.
More than simply walking around and eating, the tour gave us some valuable context for the rest of our time in Venice. After learning about cicchetti culture, the lagoon's influence on local cuisine, and what foods to look for, we had a much better understanding of what we were seeing on menus throughout the city.
For something we booked completely on a whim, this ended up being an incredible value. We had multiple stops, plenty of food, choices along the way, a fantastic guide, and an introduction to Venetian cuisine that immediately made the rest of our visit more meaningful. If you're looking for a fun and relatively casual way to start exploring Venice, we'd absolutely recommend it.
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