The Bon Vivant Blog

This is a tour worth taking if you are at all interested in food, how it is made and why it is so expensive. When you see the amount of work that goes into these products you marvel at how anyone can make any money making food products. We met our wonderful guide Laura at [...]

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Recommended by the Lonely Planet Italy guidebook, we found this place after dinner at Ristorante Alla Madonna. While the LP said it closed at 8pm, we found it open at about 9:30pm on this warm August night – lucky for us. A small, unassuming place in this crazy city – we found it almost by [...]

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This is a food store, not a restaurant – but it’s definitely worth a visit. Luckily, we happened to pass by this deli while strolling along the fish market street. The tiny tortellini with paper thin pasta through which you could see the meaty red filling caught my eye alongside the wheels of cheese in [...]

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A very well-known purveyor of gelato in Bologna which has won awards . It is a different kind of gelato from what we had a Perche No – much richer-tasting with a fuller mouth feel. In fact, as they are scooping it out from the containers, the gelato just looks thick and hangs off the [...]

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In contrast to Sorbetteria Castiglione, this is just an ice cream window with two servers flanked with a row of ice cream mixers/makers. It would be easy to walk past this place if it weren’t for the line of customers. The fact that there is a line-up even at 11pm tells you that this is [...]

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Listed in the Michelin Guide for Italy as a ‘Bib Gourmand’ restaurant, this place has made me re-think the trust I put in the ‘Bib Gourmand’ ranking. Dinner was €42 – which wasn’t bad for Venice, being a reasonably expensive tourist town. But the food? I think the word ‘Meh’ best describes my reaction to [...]

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This was probably my favourite store in Italy. It’s inside an old church that has had its inside torn out and about 4 floors of books and restaurants installed. It’s a huge bookstore, with at least 3 restaurants – one for sandwiches, one for pasta, and one that is a wine bar (there may be [...]

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