Trattoria tour

The Gatto Nero — or ‘Black Cat’ — is in Burano, a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. It is close to ‘haunted’ Torcello, with its ancient campanile and its branch of the Cipriani restaurant. (The only equivalent thing I can imagine is a branch of Soho House at Dracula’s castle, or possibly Chernobyl.) I like the name Black Cat; it reminds me of the Blue Parrot in Casablanca. I like that you must leave San Marco, with its tat and wonders combining queasily, to get here; I like the brightly coloured houses like Bratz dolls fighting; it looks, to me, like Notting Hill with fish, lace and a soul. I like that the Black Cat has a black cat; or at least it used to. I do not see it today. Perhaps it left suddenly, or died?

It is hard to find a good restaurant in Venice; there are as many bad restaurants as foul lumps of Murano glass smelted into swans or dancing rabbis, and if you do find one they have to deal with the fact that you are English. It is a strange alchemy by which Venetians have learnt to read nationality from bad clothing, bad haircuts and thighs. I am often recognised as English from the back — the back! — but I do not mind because Jan Morris called it the déshabillé of the perfectly emancipated Englishwoman. I like this too — who, beyond Catherine Cambridge, can be bothered to put cuticle oil on their toes when there is so much else to do? Bad restaurants drink in tourists with photographs of food — the first principle of the loathsome restaurant — multilingual menus with national flags, which imply that eating pizza can be a act of patriotism or aggression; but all restaurants have amazing Eurovision-style ‘sight’, or ‘Euro-sight’.