(2026: This story was written in the late twenty-tens, but Antica Locanda Montin is still very much open.)
VENICE, ITALY — It’s an early August afternoon at the restaurant Antica Locanda Montin and owner Luca Carrettin is extremely animated as he talks about monkfish. Even if you don’t speak Italian, some of the words he uses are understandable, like brutta –- ugly — which he calls the fish, and fantastico –- when referring to the creature’s means of luring its prey with antennae that look like bait.
Carrettin’s parents and aunts and uncles opened the restaurant and 12-room guesthouse in 1950 when he was small. Today, he runs the inn with his sister and a cousin. The rambling building and enormous garden don’t seem to have changed much from the look of the old photos scattered among the paintings that cover the walls. And I know that Montin’s monkfish entree hasn’t changed either for at least 30 years because my mother flipped over it in 1979 on our first trip to Italy.
Ugly fish, lazy fish, poor man’s lobster – phrases you commonly hear about this mild-tasting, firm, and delicious fish. It’s the grotesque looks of the monkfish, the meaty texture of its boneless tail, and its lazy way of luring prey into its enormous mouth that spawn such epitaphs. Monkfish is most popular as a target of gossip in the U.S., where its sporadic appearance in restaurants and markets adds to its legend.
Americans didn’t eat much monkfish until 1980, around the time Julia Child introduced us to a hulking specimen on one of her TV shows. But it’s been popular in Italy for much longer.
Carrettin draws a picture of the fish for me and I recognize it from the raw ones I see displayed on ice in the windows of restaurants here. It has a big, wide head and mouth that comprise half its length and a body and tail that are proportionately puny. Montin’s kitchen removes the backbone, chops the tail in half lengthwise, seasons it with salt, pepper, and olive oil, and grills it. Ironically, the grill marks make it look very much like Atlantic lobster. And although it has earned a reputation in America as the poor man’s lobster because the texture of its meaty boneless tail is closer to lobster than to other fish, it is not as chewy nor does it taste like lobster. It has a mild, neutral flavor — much like cod.
All of which make monkfish very versatile.
Across town in a quiet area of Venice near its north shore, Tony Serantoni, owner of Trattoria Storica, throws open the doors to his restaurant’s empty dining room to find a quiet place to talk.
It is August, and the restaurant is packed but all the tables are outside in the warm months. Serantoni opened his restaurant nearly six years ago, and he is the man behind its good food. I have just eaten his terrific monkfish with polenta. The dish has inch-chunks of springy monkfish tail in a spicy sauce atop a soupy polenta. It is flavored with lots of fresh herbs, wine, hot peppers, and the backbone of the monkfish — which he says is solid enough to throw in and remove like one would a ham bone.
Serantoni says that the fish he buys at the central fish market weight a few pounds but that monkfish come in all sizes and that the cheeks of the larger ones are edible but hard to come by and more costly.
With that fact, I suddenly understand what I’d eaten at an expensive restaurant in Rome earlier that week: it was the cheeks! The monkfish at Rome’s Antica Pesa amounted to three tiny pieces not much bigger than silver dollars. If they hadn’t been served atop individual piles of tiny lentils, the $35 dish would have been laughably insufficient for even the lightest eater. And because the texture of the fish was slightly different from the monkfish tail I’ve always had, my distain for the tiny portion was aggravated by a suspicion that I hadn’t been served monkfish at all! I’m now sure that Antica Pesa was serving the more prized delicacy – monkfish cheeks.
Fantastico!
Here are the recipes that Carrettin and Serantoni gave me verbally:
Antica Locanda Montin’s Grilled Monkfish Tail (Coda di Rospo):
Ingredients:
Two monkfish fillets
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil
Instructions:
1. Rub the fillets with a little salt, pepper, and olive oil five minutes before cooking.
2. Grill a few minutes on each side over a direct flame.
Montin serves the fish with a drizzle of olive oil on the plate, a lemon wedge, a few pomegranate seeds, and a side of pesto.
Trattoria Storica’s Monkfish with Spicy Polenta (Coda di Rospo alla “Storica” con Polenta):
Chopped garlic
Fresh rosemary, basil, marjoram, and thyme
Tomatoes
Tiny Birds eye very hot dried chili peppers
White wine
1. Sauté a little garlic, fresh rosemary, and fresh chopped tomatoes in olive oil for five minutes.
2. Add some white wine and the backbone of the monkfish and simmer for 15 minutes.
3. Add salt and pepper to taste, a little fresh basil, marjoram, and an even smaller amount of fresh thyme.
4. Add some chilies to taste and simmer for another five minutes.
5. Add olive oil to another skillet and bring to high heat. Cut the monkfish tail into one-inch pieces, dredge in flour, and cook quickly, almost burning the pieces “to keep the juice inside.”
Remove the backbone from the saucepan, add the monkfish, and serve over a plate of polenta.
Trattoria Storica
Cannaregio, 4858
Ponte dei Gesuiti
30121 Venezia
www.trattoriastorica.it
Antica Locanda Montin
Dorsoduro 1147
30125 Venezia