Antica Osteria da Cera in Campagna Lupia serves only fish. For more than 50 years. A legendary mixed fried that has never left the menu. Since when for the workers of Mestre and Marghera …
Silence. You need the silence of the Venetian countryside to listen to the dishes of Lionello Cera, two Michelin stars in Campagna Lupia, on the Romea state road, the one that leads from Venice to Chioggia. "Simplicity is the most difficult concept to interpret," says a phrase at the opening of the menu, the only one for a two-Michelin-star restaurant across Europe to provide only fish. Meat does not enter, there is a vegetarian path, but here the philosophy "from bones to pulp" applies, which sounds a bit like the concept of nose-to-tail that has radically changed the way we eat and cook. Nothing is thrown away and not only of the pig, but without unnecessary complications. Raw or just seared fish. Cold, warm and hot fish. Fish enhanced by extractions, juices, sauces, comics and fish soups. Fish on fish, investigating the deepest soul of the lagoon catch.
From the flask to the stars
The history of Antica Osteria da Cera begins in 1966 when the Cera family opens a flask shop in the old grandparents' house. "Seasonal, with a demijohn at the center of the table and a few snacks for lunch and a little frying in the afternoon. The first years by renewing the license for three months in three months … we are now 53 years old , laughs Lionello. «My mother Silvana cooked, then ten years later we made the first room that only opened on Sunday evening: tablecloths and paper napkins and 350 people who took turns to eat the fry. There was only that, then over the years we have put the mussels, then the boiled shrimp. After 2 years of hotel accommodation, I retired and I came to help too, as my brothers did. " Together they transformed this place from a tavern into a gourmet restaurant, where however time has kept going back to its origins. "I am the son of fishermen, I don't do the kitchen of exasperation, I do dishes and techniques that I know. They are a restaurant more in matter than in technique . Work on bones? «A statement. If I cook fish with fishbone I have a taste, if I remove the fishbone I have another one, but in the fish restaurant it must be served barbed. Then working on broths and concentrations obtained from bones, we return the original, amplified taste . In the menu you can read preparations such as turbot milk or iodized water, or a comic book made of water and marinated clams passed in ice to obtain a water that smells like sea to be used as a base for various dishes.
The lagoon menu
The lagoon has a unique flavor, neither of sea nor of land, an ecosystem that was very rich 30 years ago. «By now, little or no fish are caught, just small bream, red mullet, scorpion fish, go, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp. It was the time when the mists cut them with a knife; today there are only mists, by comparison. The climate is changing and in ten years everything will change ". In honor of its lagoon and gods and fish from the Upper Adriatic, a 12-course tasting menu was born that changes in every season and that fishes in the sea of memory, returning them to the present. In spring Subioti appear with mackerel and zottoi juice in tecia, a type of handmade pasta prepared in Venetian palaces, the mullet-based Scarpetta with their thorns, left to marinate in seawater for 24 hours. It is played with Tramezzino with anchovies or grilled sardines. More classic are the Bigoi coe sardee, the Broetto of cod and puína and the inevitable fried, which has never left the menu. Crunchy, perfect, tasty, pure and light; ordered by all loyal customers in the area in memory of times gone by.
The new bistro, like a country bar
It is also for them that the Cera have opened a new bistro a few kilometers away. «A bar with local cuisine, open from breakfast to evening. Let's go back to what we were 50 years ago: a country bar. For lunch we offer a vegetable buffet and a small espresso card, easy things. And in the evening the aperitif, starting at 4pm. As my mom did who prepared it for the workers of Mestre and Marghera. All with a modern cut, but without missing Sardinian saor, creamed cod, black cuttlefish, Venetian liver .
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