Spaghetti Seafood in Venice

After enjoying spaghetti seafood for the first time while in Capri, it quickly became my new obsession. I just could not stop thinking about that wonderfully made pasta, topped with a little oil, tomatoes, clams, and mussels. So when we stopped for lunch in Venice at Kori Grill, and I saw spaghetti seafood on the menu, I knew immediately that I would be ordering it. However, I was a little disappointed.

Let me preface this review with I didn't entirely hate this dish. I still ate every last bite of it. It just sort of fell flat compared to Isadoro's version.

In this dish, the clams were very tiny, making it very difficult for me to get any of the good stuff out. The small size also hindered my ability to really get the flavour from the molluscs. They were just too tiny to taste anything. It was also more difficult to get anything out of them because of their smaller size, leaving more frustrated than satisfied. However, the mussels were decent. They were a good size, but they didn't taste as fresh as the mussels in Capri. I still tried my best to enjoy them, but I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed that they weren't the same fresh, tasty mussels I'd had before.

Now, this is where things got more interesting. Looking at the pink-shelled cooked creature before me, I was confused. It looked almost like a shrimp, but it was bigger than the shrimp I was used to. I had already noticed the de-shelled, cooked shrimp near it that I was more familiar with, so I figured this had to be something else. Delaney informed me that it was most likely a prawn or crawfish. I tried investigating online, but I'm still not 100% certain which it was, but let's just assume it was a prawn.

First of all, I'm still new to this whole seafood experience. So I wasn't sure how to eat something that was still encased in its shell. Thankfully, Delaney had no issue showing me how to snap back its legs and rip the shell from the edible part. I didn't enjoy that part of the process. Unfortunately, I also didn't enjoy the eating part either.

The prawn was pretty bland. It didn't taste like it had any seasoning on it. Maybe a little oil or butter, but not much else. I couldn't even get it to absorb some of the oil on the pasta to help the flavour. The shrimp, sadly, wasn't much better either. While it looked like it had seasoning, it definitely didn't taste like it. Which is really unfortunate because I really like shrimp and was excited when I saw it included in the dish.

All in all, the dish wasn't bad, it just didn't meet my expectations. Now I know that I need to be careful ordering dishes that I've fallen in love with elsewhere - I just might be left dismayed.