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Europe > Italy > Tuscany (Florence) > Florence > Articles > Eating & Drinking in Florence

Eating & Drinking in Florence

by Lee Marshall

Leftovers also play a role in the filling soups and mushes that take the place of pasta as the classic Florentine primo

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When he was tired of court manners and court cooking, Lorenzo the Magnficent, third and most illustrious of the Medici rulers of Florence, liked nothing better than to go down the osteria with the lads. We know the sort of dishes the merry band would have tucked into from the fifteenth-century comic epic poem I beoni (literally, “the drinkers”), which is set in Florentine taverns with names that ring true even today: Il Buco, Il Fico, L’Osteria delle Bertucce. It was filling peasant fare: sausages, broad beans, smoked pork, bread and pecorino cheese, fried crabs and black-eyed beans.

The ingredients may have changed a little (fried crabs are rarely on the menu these days), but Florentine cooking is still based on cucina povera. In fact, like Lorenzo, the Tuscan aristocracy liked nothing better than to slum it when it came to gastronomy. Even Caterina de’ Medici - credited with introducing sophistication to French cooking when she arrived in Paris with her retinue of Florentine cooks - was said to nurture a passion for cibreo, a use-up-the-leftovers dish of chicken giblets which is almost impossible to find these days, due to a chronic shortage of one of the key ingredients - cock’s testicles.

Leftovers also play a role in the filling soups and mushes that take the place of pasta as the classic Florentine primo. Stale bread (pane raffermo) is a feature of acquacotta - a vegetable soup served over slices of old bread, brought back to life by soaking in water - and ribollita, a bean and cabbage soup served with grilled pane raffermo and a dribble of olive oil. Pappa al pomodoro is just what the name suggests - a pap, or mush, made by soaking and simmering stale bread in a tomato sauce. It is classic comfort food, but even the most elegant of the city’s restaurants serve it - without pappa al pomodoro on the menu, a Florentine feels slighly panicked, as if his safety-net had been snatched away.

Today, Florence has one of Italy’s most elegant - and expensive - restaurants, the Enoteca Pinchiorri, which is on two Michelin stars and climbing. It also has some of the most resolutely working-class dives in the country - some of which seem almost to exaggerate their salt-of-the-earth credentials as a reaction to the city’s tourist vocation. Take Nerbone, a stall with a few tables inside the central San Lorenzo market. It’s not that they discourage foreigners - it’s just that few of those who have come on a cultural pilgrimage to the capital of the Italian Renaissance have the stomach for tripe (trippa) and chitterlings (lampredotto) at nine in the morning. By two, when many of us are only starting to think about lunch, Nerbone has shut up shop for the day.

Too many of those who do come here for the full-on Florence experience fall for the lure of the straw-covered flask, the terracotta floor and the grotto lighting. It’s a mystery where they find the bottles to hang from the ceiling these days, as it’s well-nigh impossible to buy Chianti in a straw- covered flask. But it’s certainly public-spirited of the owners to go to the effort of tracking them down, as the dangling bottle is the equivalent of a sign which reads: Don’t Eat Here.

The myth that one can eat well just about anywhere in Tuscany was - until recently - at its most mythical in Florence. To eat even reasonably well in the city, there used to be only two options. First, one could head for one of a handful of authentic trattorie, patronised mainly by a gruff crowd of locals, in which any wavering from correct Italian (including failure to hockle the Tuscan “C” - as in that well known soft drink, Hoha-Hola) was punished by blank incomprehension. Some of these are still going strong - La Casalinga near Santo Spirito, or Mario, which has fed two generations of stallholders from nearby San Lorenzo market. This is the place to come for classics like panzanella (a summer salad made with, of all things, stale bread) and bistecca alla fiorentina - a succulent, thick T-bone, which has to come from genuine Chianina cattle and which - whatever the locals tell you - was first introduced to Florentine cuisine in the nineteenth century by British visitors desperate for a steak.

The second option was to head for a restaurant with a capital R - one of those elegant places that might have laid on the sauces a bit thick in the seventies and eighties, but which have basically changed little since your parents, and quite possible their parents, came here on their honeymoon. Reputations go up and down; the sixties star of Sabatini is now very much in decline. Paradoxically, one of the best of these safe, elegant but gastronomically unexciting restaurants - the Taverna del Bronzino - has only been around since the early eighties, despite its set-in-amber appearance.

But, between the sawdust and the twinsets, there is now a Third Way in Florence. The first restaurant to begin to do something a little different was Cibreo, which opened in the then unfashionable area around the Sant’Ambrogio market. Owner Fabbio Picchi hit on a winning formula: subtly elegant decor; a careful, creative menu which drew on the Tuscan tradition (there is very little pasta, for example) but avoided the obvious; a fine instinct for self-promotion, especially in the States; and - the winning stroke - a cut-price trattoria around the back of the kitchen, with shared communal tables and no bookings taken, which offered the same dishes as the restaurant at half the price. Cibreo became something of a brand name, with its own cookbook and range of products (a common enough phenomenom chez nous, but still rare in Italy).

Cibreo blazed a trail for a string of other creative eateries such as Alle Murate or Pane e Vino. The most recent arrival in this vein is Beccofino, Florence’s first Conran-style restaurant, set up by Scottish restaurateur David Gardner and his wife Catherine. After only five years in Florence, (where Catherine, a lawyer, came to study Italian), the Gardners are already on their second restaurant; the first, still going strong, was the modern, stylish, multi-function restaurant/pizzeria/wine bar Baldovino One welcome shared feature of all these places is the attention they give to wine (not just the usual overpriced range of Chianti Classico Riservas) and desserts. Cantucci (sweet almond biscuits) dipped in vin santo are all very well, but even the most gung-ho Tuscophile has usually had enough of them after a couple of weeks.