Harry’s Bar

First · the street

The street that went nowhere

Harry’s Bar is at San Marco 1323, at the end of Calle Vallaresso, in Venice. Get off the water bus at San Marco Vallaresso: the door is about 115 feet away. From the middle of Piazza San Marco it is about five minutes on foot, toward the water.

Giuseppe Cipriani opened it on May 13, 1931. His wife, Giulietta, found the room: a rope warehouse, fifteen feet by thirty, at the end of a dead-end street. In 1931 no bridge joined the street to Piazza San Marco, so, he wrote, customers would have to come on purpose. Nobody could stop in on the way to somewhere else.

Look for the name on the lit glass, behind an iron grille.

Then · the counter

The Bellini, at the counter

Order a Bellini at the counter, before anything else. The house dates it to 1948, in this room: small white peaches, puréed, and Prosecco. Cipriani named it for Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian painter of the fifteenth century.

The house says he favored the white peaches above the others, and that Italy had them in abundance from June through September. Come in those months.

The drink comes in a straight glass, not a flute, set on a paper napkin, with the house emblem etched on the side.

Take a stool. The counter runs along one side of the room: polished wood, a round clock and the bottles behind it, stools with leather tops.

Then · a round table

Carpaccio, for a countess

Now sit down. Ask for one of the round tables in the bar room: wooden tops, leather-backed chairs, a low white ceiling. The founder wanted a simple, elegant place, a room where no décor would weigh on you, and where there was light.

Order the Carpaccio alla Cipriani. The house tells this story too. It was made for Countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo, whose doctor had forbidden her cooked meat. Cipriani sliced raw beef very thin and finished it with a splash of a sauce he called universal. He named the dish after the painter Carpaccio, whom all Venice was talking about that year because of an exhibition, and for the red of the plate.

It arrives thin and red, the sauce laid over it in a lattice, edge to edge. Eat it with the bread, and a second Bellini if it is July.

Cipriani chose a room at the end of a dead-end street, so that nobody would come in by chance.

After · the menu

One Venetian plate

Then order one dish that could only be Venetian. On the house’s sample menu: baccalà mantecato with grilled polenta, baby artichokes from Torcello, cuttlefish with polenta, calf’s liver alla veneziana. Take the liver; if liver is not for you, the sole Casanova. Finish with the vanilla meringue cake.

Look around while you wait. A painting of the lagoon hangs on the back wall, small lamps are lit along the walls, and windows down one side give the room its light.

The rest of the menu is the house’s own, and it does not try to surprise you: cannelloni, baked tagliolini with ham, a veal chop Milanese, a club sandwich, a chicken curry with rice pilaf. The house lists the keys to its tiny bar as service, freedom and the lack of imposition. You order what you like, in the order you like. This order is ours.

Last · the hours

Eleven to eleven

Harry’s Bar is open every day from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Book a table through its page on cipriani.com, call +39 041 52 85 777, or write to [email protected]. The house does not say how far ahead it takes bookings. For a summer evening, do not leave it to the day.

Come first at eleven in the morning, when the room opens, for the Bellini alone. Come back at night for the carpaccio, with a booking.

The room is small on purpose. The founder wanted people who had come for it, and the house still describes what it is after as the feeling of a club: people who know each other, easy talk, a staff that seems to know you. Its motto: to serve is first to love.

Four generations of Ciprianis have run the family business. The regulars the house names include Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Katharine Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Orson Welles, Frank Lloyd Wright, Joe DiMaggio, Truman Capote and Peggy Guggenheim. In 2001, Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage declared the bar a national landmark. The house says no other public place in Italy received that honor in the century.