Where to Eat in Florence

Read it as a shopping list rather than a wish list. Four of these are counter food you can eat standing up in ten minutes; three are the reason to book a table; two are seasonal and disappear in July.

Two of those columns deserve a warning. "Traditional product" is a register, not a quality mark: Regione Toscana's own database says plainly that the traditional-products list carries none of the guarantees a DOP or IGP does, and that products on it are not checked against their description beyond ordinary food-safety law. It tells you what a dish is, not that the plate in front of you is good.

And the bread basket is not free anywhere in this city — it arrives with the coperto, which is the subject of a whole section below.

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding on a Florence menu. A bistecca is not a portion. It is a cut of loin, priced per kilo or per etto — an etto is 100 grams — and the kitchen brings out the piece it has, weighs it, and the number on the bill is the weight multiplied by the rate on the menu. The menu line that says a price "all'etto" is therefore a tenth of what a kilo costs, which is why the figure looks reassuring and the bill does not.

The cut itself is defined. The Consorzio di Tutela del Vitellone Bianco dell'Appennino Centrale IGP — the body that certifies the beef most Florentine kitchens buy for this dish — publishes the reference: the steak comes from the loin, its own recipe works with a 1.2 kg piece, and it calls 5 cm the right height to grill a rare steak properly. The IGP mark is stamped on the surface of the certified cuts, so a kitchen that is serving the real thing usually says so on the menu, in those words.

The arithmetic that matters to you: 1.2 kg of bone-in loin is a plate for two adults with a vegetable, and often for three if there are starters. One steak each is a rookie order that ends with meat left on the board and a bill nobody enjoyed. Ask the waiter what the piece weighs before it is cooked — this is a normal question here, not a rude one — and if the answer is over a kilo, split it. Ask for it rare, too, because that is how the consortium's own method finishes it: seared on both sides, taken off while the centre is still red, and rested before it is carved. A kitchen that agrees to cook a bistecca well done is telling you something about its priorities.

We publish no price for it. No official page lists what Florentine restaurants charge per kilo, and any figure we invented would be out of date within a season. What we can tell you is the shape of the decision: one steak, two people, weighed in front of you, and the weight agreed before it goes on the grill.

The most Florentine lunch in the city costs less than a museum ticket and is eaten standing up. Lampredotto and trippa are both registered by Regione Toscana as traditional products of the province of Florence, and the register is unusually specific about what you are eating. Trippa is the rumen and the reticulum — the first two chambers of the cow's stomach — pale, smooth and mild. Lampredotto is the abomasum, the fourth chamber, darker, softer, with the violet crests that give it its look. Both are washed, soaked overnight and boiled for two to three hours before they reach a counter; the register records production running at roughly 2,500 quintals of trippa and 800 of lampredotto a year, which is to say this is an industry, not a curiosity.

At the cart, lampredotto is served in a semelle — a plain round roll — with the top of the bread dunked in the cooking broth so it is soaked through, then dressed with salsa verde, a green parsley-and-garlic sauce, or a red chilli sauce, or both if you say so. Trippa usually comes in a bowl or a tub, cut in strips with tomato, the way the register describes the traditional preparation. Neither tastes of offal in the way people brace themselves for; both taste of broth.

The practical parts. The carts work the middle of the day and many are packed away by mid-afternoon, so this is a lunch, not a dinner plan. You queue, you order at the counter, you eat at the little standing shelf or on a step. There is no coperto, no table service, no bill to read. Ask for it "bagnato" if you want the roll dipped and "con tutte e due le salse" if you want both sauces. We name no individual stand on this page, because the ones worth naming change hands and we found no official register of them — the ones you want are the busy ones with Florentines in the queue, in San Lorenzo, at Sant'Ambrogio and around the market streets.

Schiacciata is the flatbread — pressed thin, salted on top, glossy with olive oil, baked in trays and sold by the slice or split into a sandwich. It is the reason the sandwich queues in this city are what they are: a panino here is a proper piece of bread with two or three good things inside it, not a snack.

The loaf on your table is a different animal, and it explains half of Tuscan cooking. Pane Toscano DOP is made, per its consortium, from Tuscan soft wheat, type 0 flour that keeps the wheat germ, natural sourdough and water. Salt is not in that ingredient list. Visitors read the unsalted crumb as a mistake; it is a design. The bread is built to be a vehicle — for salty prosciutto and pecorino, for oil, for the soups below — and to keep well enough that four-day-old loaves become dinner rather than waste.

That is also the honest advice about the famous sandwich shops. A queue of forty people outside a panino counter in the middle of the afternoon is a social media artefact, not a verdict; the same fillings on the same schiacciata come out of ordinary bakeries three streets away with no queue at all. If you like the theatre, join it. If you are hungry, walk.

One name that trips people up: schiacciata alla fiorentina, on a pastry counter in February, is not this bread at all. It is the flat sponge cake of Carnival, dusted heavily with icing sugar and often stencilled with the Florentine lily. Same word, different aisle.

Ribollita is the dish that explains the bread. Vetrina Toscana, the Regione Toscana food programme, records it as a poor-kitchen dish: vegetables from the garden, cannellini beans, cavolo nero — the dark, blistered Tuscan kale — and stale bread, cooked in quantity and reheated over the following days, which is exactly where the name comes from. Reboiled. The regional recipe layers toasted Tuscan bread rubbed with garlic into the bottom of an earthenware bowl, ladles the soup over it and finishes it with raw olive oil poured on at the table.

Eat it between roughly October and April. Cavolo nero is a cold-weather crop, improved by frost, and a July ribollita is a menu concession to tourists rather than a Florentine dinner. In the warm half of the year the same stale bread turns up as pappa al pomodoro, thick with tomato, or as panzanella, soaked and tossed with tomato, onion and basil and served cool.

The useful rule for reading any trattoria menu here: the primo section is where the local cooking lives. Soups, hand-cut pappardelle with a meat ragù, tortelli filled with potato from the Mugello. The secondi are simpler than people expect — grilled meat, beans, a vegetable — and if you are not having the steak, two starters and a primo is a better Florentine meal than a dutiful three courses.

Set into the rusticated stone of the old palaces, at about waist height, there are small arched hatches with wooden shutters. They are buchette del vino — wine windows — and they are the remains of a Renaissance retail system: the noble families who owned Tuscan estates sold their own wine directly from the ground floor of the town palace, a flask at a time, through a hole in the wall that let them trade without opening the house.

The Associazione Culturale Buchette del Vino has been cataloguing them since its website went online in March 2016, window by window, in Florence and in the Tuscan towns around it, and it is the association's census that turned a piece of architectural trivia into a documented list. The plaques you see beside some of the hatches come out of that work.

A handful of bars and wine shops now serve through them again — a glass, or an ice cream, handed out of the wall. It is charming, it is a photograph, and it is also, honestly, the most expensive way to drink a glass of wine in Florence. Treat it as a stop rather than the evening. The windows that are not serving are the better sight anyway: look along Via delle Belle Donne, Via Santo Spirito and the streets behind Palazzo Strozzi, and once you know the shape you will see them everywhere.

The building has its own page here — the market building itself covers the ground-floor stalls, the leather market outside and how to use the place — so this section is only about eating in it.

The first floor is a food hall: counters, not restaurants, each doing one thing, around shared tables. It is open every day from 9:00 to 23:00, per the market's own information page, and that single fact makes it the most useful address in this guide. Florence closes between meals. At 16:00, when a trattoria kitchen is shut and the museums have taken the afternoon, the food hall is serving. At 22:30, when the ordinary kitchen has stopped taking orders, it is still serving. Its own site names a counter dedicated to the bistecca and a pizzeria among the traders.

How to use it: walk the whole floor before you commit, because the counters price and portion very differently; order at each counter separately and pay there; carry the tray to a table and expect to share it. There is no coperto and no table service, so nothing is added at the end. It is not the most atmospheric meal in the city and it is not trying to be — it is the meal that is available when nothing else is.

The rule that protects you is the simple one: everything a restaurant will charge has to be legible before you order it, on the menu or on the price list displayed outside. If a charge is not written down, ask about it before you sit.

Two practical consequences. First, in a piazza with a view — Piazza della Signoria, the terraces along the river — you are paying a location premium through the table tariff, and that is a fair trade only if the view is the point of the meal. Second, the coperto makes the cheap end of a menu behave oddly: a plate of pasta and a glass of water for one person carries the same per-head charge as a full dinner, so a solo lunch is proportionally the worst value a sit-down table offers.

That is precisely the hour to eat at a counter instead.

The only hours in this table that come from an official page are the market's: Mercato Centrale's first floor states 9:00 to 23:00, every day. Everything else is the pattern, written plainly.

Two more conventions worth knowing. Many family trattorie close one full day a week, usually Sunday or Monday, and much of the city takes two weeks off in August — if you are here in mid-August, check that a place is open before you walk across town for it. And a booking for dinner is normal even in modest places; the walk-in table at 20:45 on a Saturday is the reason people end up eating badly.

Tap water in Florence is drinking water, and asking for it in a restaurant is where visitors get stuck. Most trattorie will sell you bottled water, still or sparkling, and many will simply not offer the tap. Order it as "acqua del rubinetto" and accept that in a tourist-facing place the answer is sometimes no; it is a habit rather than a health question.

Outside, the city gives it away. The Comune di Firenze publishes an open dataset of the active high-quality drinking fountains in the municipality — the fontanelli — as mapped points, managed by the water utility Publiacqua and released under a CC-BY 4.0 licence; the version we read was last modified on 3 March 2025. These are not the old stone spouts: they are small kiosks that dispense filtered, chlorine-free water, and the utility publishes a quality label for each one showing what is actually in the water at that fountain. Some of them dispense chilled and sparkling water as well as still — the fountain itself tells you which, and that detail is not in the city's dataset, so check the machine rather than a map.

Carry a bottle. In July and August this matters more than any other tip on this page: the historic centre is stone and reflects heat back at you all afternoon, and a refill is free at every one of those kiosks. The old public fountains and the mask-and-basin street fountains are a different thing again, and unless a spout is marked as drinking water, do not assume.