Our Favorite Food in Florence

Arnaud waiting for his lunch. He looks more patient to eat than I think he actually was. (We were starving at this point.) Florence, Italy. October 16, 2019.

On travel, we tend to eat out once per day and get the rest of our food at grocery stores and sandwich shops. However, with dining-out options lackluster in our Swiss home base, we’ll often go for one meal out per day when we visit a place with delicious food.

Like Italy. Italy has delicious food.

We don’t study up in advance on restaurants and plan our trips around food—though this doesn’t sound like a bad way of doing things (come to think of it). We tend to research during the trip via recommendations found on-line and in our guidebooks.

On this trip to Florence, we didn’t have a solid guidebook to lead the way, which meant that we tended to happen upon places as we rushed around the city to see as much as we could in the limited time we had. If the spot looked good from the outside or had a solid on-line review, and if it happened to situate itself within the area where we stayed or the areas where we visited, we went for it.

And as we prioritized seeing over eating, we went back more than once to several of the restaurants that we really liked on the first pass—so we can stand by these restaurants in Florence as solid recommendations.

Classic Tuscan Meal: Antica Trattoria da Tito

Antica Trattoria da Tito, a cozy little casual restaurant with a lace-curtained, windowed door, opens for dinner at seven. When we arrived a few minutes before seven, it had a small crowd waiting outside for the doors to open—despite the reservations-in-advance requirement. (We had reservations.)

I started with house-made tagliatelle pasta with a wild-boar sauce and had a main course of roasted lamb. Others at the table had gnocchi, which I taste-tested and deemed delicious; roasted chicken; and steak. The servings came quickly and provided massive meals we almost couldn’t eat entirely—and yet, somehow, we sure did.

Some people could get turned off by the “respect our traditions” language on the menu, which states they’ll hold firm to not serving cappuccino for dinner or cooking your meat past the recommended temperature. Frankly, I have no problem respecting traditions and expect to eat as the locals eat when I go to a local restaurant. Yet if you demand getting exactly what you want exactly as you want it—not as the menu describes—go elsewhere.

Yet if you do, I firmly believe you’ll miss out on a delicious meal.

Farm-to-Table Tuscan Meal: Il Desco Bistro

My friend found Il Desco Bistro somewhere online when hunting for a dinner spot with healthful and vegetable-filled meals. Whatever expectations we might have had from looking the restaurant’s website—which looks pretty darn good—this spot exceeded them.

We all ate different dishes as starters and main courses, and none of us felt like we’d gone astray with our choices.

Two of us had an appetizer of beets with a pecorino-cheese gelato and pumpkin seeds and another of the group had a side dish of roasted vegetables to start.

For a main course, I had a cut of pork that tasted warm and hearty—perfect for an autumn evening—with plentiful roasted green vegetables on the side. And I wrapped up the meal with a tiramisu, because I can’t visit Florence without having tiramisu at least once.

The tiny little brightly lighted restaurant had a warm and welcoming chef and wait staff—a team of two, from what we could tell—and they seemed to love their work and their food.

The Pizzeria: Simbiosi

You don’t go to Italy and pass up pizza. You especially don’t pass up pizza when you would choose pizza in the unlikely scenario wherein you had to pick only one food item to eat for the rest of your life. (Like me.)

With only four days in town, I wanted to ensure we ate good pizza, so I spent an inordinate amount of time reading pizzeria reviews online and in our limited guidebook. Turns out that the one we loved the most, Simbiosi, didn’t appear in any of these sources. It just looked yummy and had full seats every time we walked past it on our way to and from our AirBNB.

And so, one night when the hour ticked far too late and we thought we’d eat our arms off before we made it to one of the recommended pizzerias on the outskirts of the city center, we decided to try it. They couldn’t seat us, but they could give us pizza to go. We each had a seasonal-special pizza: Mine had pesto and pistachio and Arnaud’s had truffle. We shared, and I couldn’t say who picked the better option.

The pistachio pizza had a delicious depth of flavor and a unique taste profile and the truffle pizza had a light yet vibrant tomato sauce and truffle flavor that didn’t come through with too much intensity at the eating, yet left a lingering taste that made you wish you had just one more slice long after you’d consumed the entire pizza.

We didn’t want to return to Lausanne without having that good of a pizza experience just one more time, so we convinced our friends to join us for pizza at Simbiosi on our last night in town. The restaurant could only give us a table if we ate quickly, and we had no problem managing that. We had two different truffle pizzas, the pistachio again, and a margherita as a baseline option. All equaled yum.

The Mozzarella Bar: Obica

Though we didn’t know it when we popped into the restaurant for lunch one day between tourist sites, Obica has locations elsewhere in Italy, Europe, the United States, and Japan.

Another shot of the interior at Obica. Even if I’d shown a shot of the mozzarella, it wouldn’t have done it justice. Delicious. October 16, 2019.

Typically, you can’t get mozzarella this tasty outside of Italy—so I have high doubt that the Obica locations not in Italy have the Italian locations’ quality of cheesy goodness. This means that I can’t recommend visiting an Obica not situated in an Italian city, but I do highly recommend visiting one within the country. We even returned a second time before we returned to Lausanne, because the mozzarella on offer tasted just that taste bud–meltingly good.

On our first visit, we shared a large antipasto platter that included varieties of cured meats, mozzarella cheese (of course) and an order of lightly fried vegetables and cheese. On our second visit, we shared a massive salad filled with fresh vegetables and a tasting platter that featured a selection of five different mozzarella cheeses.

The location in Florence, where we dined, has a massive yet elegant footprint inside and a lovely, umbrella-covered interior courtyard for dining in the front. Though you don’t need to wear high fashion to eat here, I wouldn’t walk in with cargo shorts and a baseball cap, either. Dress casual-chic and you will fit in perfectly with the upmarket clientele and hipster waitstaff.

The Gelato Shop: My Sugar

My husband has a mistress: Ice cream.

This meant that we visited Florentine gelato shops approximately twice a day on at least three of the days of our four-day trip. In short: We visited a lot of gelateria.

Though I took a pass—I’d rather fill up on mozzarella (and pizza) than ice cream—I found that we returned most often to My Sugar for gelato, and not only due to its proximity to our AirBNB. Arnaud didn’t try all the flavors, but he tried most of them—and our friends may have given the rest of the flavors a go on our visits with them after they arrived.

Arnaud had the black sesame flavor as part of every cup, along with the dark chocolate, though he loved the coconut and the hazelnut and the vanilla as well. In fact, I don’t think he discovered a My Sugar gelato flavor that he didn’t like.

See (and Eat) for Yourself

I wish I’d taken more pictures. In all honesty, my focus stayed on the food.

This means that you’ll have to make do with the photos I have, my reviews, and my high recommendation that you go to Florence, visit these restaurants, and see (and eat) for yourself.