Restaurants, Trattorias, and Osterias
When you’re searching for dining options in Italy, there are essentially three types of restaurants in Italy: restaurants, trattorias, and osterias, although markets, food halls, food specialty shops, bars, and enotecas specializing in regional Italian wines are in nearly every town and city.
In Venice, you’ll find a unique name with a completely unique food culture—the bácaro bar—home to the famous Venetian cicchetti.
Restaurants are typically the more formal and usually more expensive establishments than the other two. You can expect a menu of the chef’s creations for the day, often a sommelier, linen tablecloths and napkins, along with the requisite amount of silverware for everything from the antipasto through main courses and hopefully service that matches the price.
Trattorias are less formal. There are daily specials which may not match the culinary creativity of a formal restaurant but the ambience is more relaxed and perhaps a bit noisy.
The most casual and smallest of the three is an osteria with its fairly limited menu of simple food items like pizza, pasta, sandwiches, and sometimes the meat or fish of the day.
Buon appetito!
