Little Venice

While exploring the Finger Lakes and staying in Interlaken, we decided to drive to Trumansburg to dine at Little Venice. The building was brick red and it had a long dark green awning out front with its name on it. When we entered it was busy with a large dining room and a lot of people. It was obviously a popular place.

We were seated in a far booth next to a large room with a lot of people, and another table of eight near us. The waitress took our order fairly quickly, but when more than thirty minutes went by and we still had not received our drinks, it seemed as though they had forgotten us. I went to the hostess stand to tell them and the drinks did arrive, but it still took fifty-five minutes before we got our dinner. No doubt it was due to the large parties that were there before us which took priority.

Finally our food came. My husband had ordered Chicken Riggies with bacon in an Alfredo sauce. What was this thing called “Riggies”? It was new to us. The picture looked like they meant Rigatoni that was baked with cheese, so he ordered it. It came with fried chunks of chicken, rolled in egg and bread crumbs, placed on a bowl of pasta with a white sauce, melted cheese and baked. Only his dish was not made with rigatoni, it was large elbow macaroni. Had they run out of rigatoni?

I ordered Eggplant Roulade Florentine, which was fresh eggplant cutlets rolled with spinach and Italian cheeses and topped with mushrooms, onions, roasted red peppers, and had a white wine tomato sauce, served over spaghetti zucchini.

Both dishes were a lot of food. I mean, there was enough food for two people, so if you dine here, keep that in mind. Both dishes were good and we ate as much as we could, but had to leave the rest. The waitress apologized for us having to wait almost an hour, and she did take five dollars off our bill.

The menu has many offerings with different pastas, pizzas, salads, wraps and burgers, and if we lived in the area we would go at a different night of the week and try different things. It is closed on Wednesdays. As an additional note, when we got home, I made my version of “Riggies”. Only I made it with rigatoni, and instead of frying chunks of chicken, I used slices of chicken sausage, plus I added mozzarella and cream cheese and more Italian seasoning. It made the dish much better.