Everybody Still Shows Up At Harry’s Bar In Venice 10 Decades After Opening

“Then he was pulling open the door of Harry’s bar and was inside and he had made it again, and was at home.”

So begins a chapter in Ernest Hemingway’s 1950 novel, Across the River and Into the Trees. He even went on to put the bar’s proprietor, Giuseppe Cipriani, into the novel as Giuseppe Cipriani—the only time a living person appeared in any of Hemingway’s fiction. Today, after ninety-three years, Harry’s is perhaps the most famous bar in the world, as well as one of the best (and expensive)— restaurants in Venice.

It was at Harry’s that the bellini was born—a cocktail of prosecco and white peach juice, named after the Venetian artist, just as the sliced raw beef with mayonnaise invented here was named after Carpaccio. Before the war Harry’s regular patrons included Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, Charlie Chaplin and Arturo Toscanini. On a single day in 1934 the guests included the crown heads of Spain, Denmark, Norway, and Greece, none knowing the others were in town.

Like so many things that happen in saloons, Harry’s Bar was a buy back. During Prohibition in the U.S., Venice’s hotel lounges were all posh, not true “American bars.” It was into such a hotel bar in Venice, the Europa-Brittania Hotel, that a wealthy young Bostonian tippler named Harry Pickering came with frequency in 1929. His original intention was to travel with his aunt and her gigolo and to dry out in Italy, but Pickering insulted them so that they left him behind, lira-less in Venice.

Turning to Giuseppe Cipriani, the hotel’s bartender, Pickering asked to borrow just enough money to pay his hotel bill and go home. For some reason Cipriani took pity on the young American and gave him the money, assuming he would never see it, or Pickering, again. Two years passed, without a word, but true to his promise, Pickering eventually did return to Venice and handed Cipriani 10,000 lire plus an additional 40,000, with which the two of them could open a small American-style saloon be called Harry’s Bar.

It debuted on May 13, 1931 and years later Cipriani would joke, “If all those who said they were at Harry’s for the opening had really been there, this place would have to be the size of the Piazza San Marco.”

The menu grew a little year by year, at first some ham and cheese sandwiches, even hamburgers, then some pastas and Venetian dishes like risotto con seppie.

Pickering himself lost all interest in the venture and returned home, leaving the bar to Cipriani. When the war came, Cipriani’s clientele were prevented from going to their favorite watering hole. Then, one day in 1943, a group of Fascists entered the bar and told Cipriani he had to put up a sign reading, “We do not want Jews in this establishment.” When the thugs returned a few days later demanding to see the sign, Cipriani led him to the kitchen, where it was displayed behind the kitchen door, causing the infuriated Fascists to tear the place up with their bayonets.

Rather than accede to coercion, Cipriani closed the doors, sailed the Grand Canal and went hunting on the isle of Torcello until the war ended. Harry’s Bar was turned into a German soldiers’ mess hall.

After the war—Hemingway started coming in 1949—the little tables at Harry’s were day and night filled with international jet setters and show business stars, not least Orson Welles, whose bellowing voice could be heard coming all the way down the Calle Vallarosso. Georges Braque, Henry Fonda, Aristotle Onassis, Truman Capote, Rita Hayworth, Peggy Guggenheim and Woody Allen were patrons. Although unlike any other bar-restaurant in Italy but never a true club, it still seems that everybody knows everybody else at Harry’s.

Now in its tenth decade, run for by Cipriani’s son Arrigo after Giuseppe died in 1980, Harry’s Bar was declared a National Landmark in 2001, so, even if the Ciprianis wanted to move, they are prohibited from doing so. They are not even allowed to change the furniture or décor.

Arrigo is still, at 92, the consummate Venetian gentleman, hospitable to all, friendly but never intimate with some, always aware that he embodies the true spirit of the place. When I asked him why he continues to use such small, trattoria-size wine glasses, Cipriani shrugged: “If I pour the wine into one of those big glasses, you are practically forced to take it in your hand and smell the wine. You don’t want to feel stupid in front of an important sommelier! If the wine is bad, it will be so even in a big glass.”

Arrigo’s views on Harry’s food are much the same. “The menu is larger now,” he says, “but the food is traditional Italian, from the housewives, not from the great French chefs. We make our own bread, breadsticks, pasta, cakes and ice-cream. All our cooks can reproduce our taste, which by now belongs to the DNA of our customers.”

It is certainly true that Harry’s food reads like simple home cooking, most of it drawn from Adriatic waters , like the scampi and octopus salad, the cuttlefish with white polenta, and the grilled fish. But there are also wonderful meat dishes, like the tripe alla veneziana with rice pilaf, the calf’s liver with onions, veal piccata with lemon sauce, and chicken curry, not to mention the irresistible cheese-and-ham grilled cheese sandwiches with a touch of dry mustard and Worcestershire sauce that have been on the menu almost since the beginning.

And then there are the pastas—risotto with sausage and radicchio, pappardelle with saffron and bacon, and the extraordinary tagliolini gratinata, baked with cream and cheese beneath a golden brown crust.

“The changes mainly concern the casual style of the fashion more than the people themselves,” says Cipriani, “and it has been going on for a long time. But luxury is still the engine of everybody’s life. The question is, what exactly is luxury today? Is it based on décor or on people? On the form or on the substance?”

After nearly a century in business, Harry’s Bar hardly seems a business. Instead, it works as a beacon along the Grand Canal, whose blue awnings you see from the vaporetto, whose glass-and-wood door is a refuge and, for many like Hemingway, has become a true home away from home.