SRV – No.9
December 19, 2019
SRV, which stands for Serene Republic of Venice – we’re back in the land of Italian food, and having only just visited Venice this year and thoroughly enjoyed its food, I was quite excited to taste SRV’s take on Venetian fare.
As soon as we walked into the restaurant, we were impressed. Â They have a great bar and a decent sized area for standing and enjoying a cocktail and some of their cicchetti, with waiter service.
Cicchetti – pronounced ‘chi-ket-tee’ is Italian for small bite and SRV rather pride themselves on their selection and on their choice of Italian influenced cocktails. Â Did we? Â Of course we did. Â The cicchetti we tried were beautifully presented and tasty little morsels. Â They varied from mini meatballs to tiny pieces of bread topped with anchovies or salt cod.
As we were in an Italian that boasted freshly made pasta from house milled flour, we couldn’t resist sampling their offerings.  I don’t think I’ll ever have a full mastery of all the different pasta names, but Clark chose an agnolotti pasta with beef cheeks.  Agnolotti, from the Piemonte region, is like ravioli; a flat pasta folded and filled, in this case with beef cheeks. I opted for the more obvious spaghetti  with jonah crab (crab from the east coast).  Both were great and in true Italian form cooked to the perfect level of al dente.
You’ll start to see a pattern here with our visits to Italian restaurants. Â After our main course we spotted a Meyer lemon gelato served with a Huckleberry jam, which of course would go very well with Grappa – oh, go on then. Â Not totally Italian as Meyer lemons are native to China (a cross between a regular lemon and a mandarin) and huckleberries are a berry from North America and not, as per my initial thought, anything to do with Huckleberry Finn, a favourite childhood character. Â Marvellous. Â All finished off with an authentic tasting espresso. Â A great night.
