Glam Restaurant by Enrico Bartolini

Lagoon fish in Ascani’s hands

Fish and shellfish come off the Venice markets into Donato Ascani’s hands; as resident chef at Glam Restaurant by Enrico Bartolini in Santa Croce, Venice, he works them through a modern Venetian line. Born in 1987 in Fiuggi, Lazio, Ascani came to this station after a run of Italian kitchens that shaped the discipline now visible on the pass: L’Antica Pesa in Verona with Fabio Tacchella, ALMA in Colorno under Gualtiero Marchesi, Piazza Duomo in Alba with Enrico Crippa, and Tre Cristi in Milan with Paolo Lopriore. Since 2016 he has led the kitchen at Ristorante Glam by Enrico Bartolini at Palazzo Venart, where his cooking keeps close to the lagoon without treating it as scenery. The ingredients matter because the method asks them to carry memory and present tense at once. Fish, shellfish, and the markets of Venice give the kitchen its working vocabulary. Ascani’s part is not to cover them, but to cut, season, cook, and place them with enough instinct that the dish still belongs to the water outside the palace.

A Venetian tasting menu with a modern cut

The restaurant runs as a formal tasting-menu house, and the craft sits in the sequence: one plate handing the next a change of register, one lagoon note tightened before another opens. Glam holds two Michelin stars, earned in 2019 under Ascani’s resident-chef tenure. Those numbers belong to this address, not to a borrowed reputation. Inside the kitchen, the stated approach is modern, but the word only has use when it meets the bench. Ascani’s cooking draws on instinctive technique and Venetian terroir; the work turns on decisions of fish, shellfish, salinity, texture, and restraint. The wine program is exceptional, a necessary counterweight in a room where the menu is built to move by courses rather than by single orders. Nothing here asks the lagoon to stand still. The method reinterprets its flavors through contemporary craft, with the palace holding the frame and the pass doing the sharper work.

The room, the pass, the courtyard

The room at Palazzo Venart is intimate and quiet, with a glazed indoor dining room and a shaded courtyard under an old magnolia tree. That softness changes the pace of the pass. In a larger room, fine dining can turn into theatre by force of scale; here the work has less distance to travel. Plates leave the kitchen into a sophisticated, formal service style, then settle into a room that lets details stay audible: the cut of shellfish, the temperature of a sauce, the rhythm of a tasting menu moving without hurry. The setting is atmospheric without needing to announce itself. Venice is present in the ingredients and in the old-palace enclosure, but the kitchen keeps the focus on the plate. Ascani’s station gives Glam its present tense: Venetian material, modern discipline, and the old magnolia tree just beyond the glass.