Osteria Ae Sconte Wednesday continued Osteria Ae Sconte was the only restaurant which we visited during the trip that I had planned to go to before the trip started. At the time I researched Osteria Ae Sconte, it was ranked #1 out of nearly 800 restaurants listed in Venice (It is currently #20). The one complaint reoccurring in the reviews was that it was hard to find, so I carefully checked online before we left our hotel. Osteria Ae Sconte is usually mentioned as near the Rialto Bridge, but as I looked at the map, it didn't really look to be that far from San Marco and our hotel. So I used Google maps for directions and it said the restaurant was only about a 7 minute walk. I wrote down the turn by turn directions and it was an easy walk to the restaurant. Osteria Ae Sconte is a small restaurant, but as large as many where we dined this trip. I am told that it is operated by a brother and sister. I assume the sister was the nice woman who greeted us and took our order. Her English was good and between her help and the brief English translations on the menu, the ordering was easy. As soon as we were seated, we were each given a glass of Prosecco. We started our meal with an assorted fish appetizer which was one of my favorite dishes on the whole trip. There was just one item in the assorted fish which I could not identify and really didn't care for. Linda next had small potato dumplings in cream of cheeses and walnuts. It wasn't exactly what she expected, but she liked it and I enjoyed the taste that I had, although I didn't notice the walnuts. My next course was my second fish soup of the day. The broth wasn't quite as impressive in this one, but it was heaped with seafood. Both dishes were very good and I can't say which one was my favorite. My main dish was black cuttlefish Venetian style with polenta. It was one of the Venetian specialty dishes I wanted to try this dish. Linda thought it looked very unappetizing in the sauce made from its own ink and it was one of my few dishes that she didn't sample during the trip. I found it OK, but not the treat that the rest of the meal was. I probably would have enjoyed the cuttlefish more if it had been grilled. We pared the meal with a pinot grigio by S. Stino di livenza, another winery from the Veneto province. It was one of my favorite wines tried in Venice. We were both too full for desert, but finished the meal with a free carafe of sweet Lemoncello.
Since we were in the neighborhood of the Rialto Bridge, we decided to explore some of that neighborhood and walked on to the Rialto Bridge. It is the oldest bridge over the Grand Canal and for centuries was the economic center of Venice and the Venetian empire. After taking some night photographs, we took the vaporetto (water bus) back to our hotel.
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