Where to eat in Florence: local dishes, markets and neighborhoods

Florence rewards a simple plan: one market meal, one trattoria lunch, one proper dinner. Prices below are 2026 estimates for one person, without wine unless noted.

Tuscan cooking is plain and bread-based: beans, olive oil, stale bread, black cabbage and beef. The dishes to order are bistecca alla fiorentina (a thick T-bone grilled rare, sold by weight and meant for two or more), ribollita (bread and bean soup with black cabbage, a winter lunch), pappa al pomodoro (tomato and bread soup), pici (hand-rolled thick pasta, often with ragù or garlic), and crostini toscani with chicken liver pâté. Lampredotto, a tripe sandwich, is the city's street food and is best from a market stall.

For a market meal, the stalls around Mercato di San Lorenzo and the smaller Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio serve cooked food through the morning and lunch. Sant'Ambrogio is the more local of the two and sits east of the centre, walkable from Santa Croce. For a sit-down lunch, look for a trattoria a few streets off the tourist core — the Santa Croce, Sant'Ambrogio and Santo Spirito sides all have them — and take the menu del giorno rather than ordering à la carte.

Dinner is where bistecca happens. Order it for the table, ask the price per kilogram first, and expect it rare unless you say otherwise. If you do not want a large meat bill, a primo plus a shared antipasto is a normal, cheaper dinner. Note the coperto: a small per-person cover charge on the bill is standard, not a scam, and tipping is not expected.

Florence is not a cheap city to eat in the centre, but the gap between a tourist-street restaurant and a neighborhood trattoria is large. Coffee is the clearest example: standing at the bar costs a fraction of sitting at a table on a piazza. The same rule applies to food — the further you walk from the Duomo and Ponte Vecchio, the less you pay for the same dish.

Book dinner, particularly for bistecca and at weekends. Many small trattorias have few tables and fill up by 20:00. Lunch is walk-in friendly and cheaper.

Read the menu before you sit. A board with photos in five languages, a tout at the door, or a menu with no prices are all reasons to keep walking. Restaurants near the Duomo and Ponte Vecchio charge for the location, not the cooking.

Check the coperto and any service charge on the bill; both are normal in Italy, so do not treat them as an error. Tipping is optional.

If you have dietary needs, note that ribollita and pappa al pomodoro are usually meat-free but are often made with meat or chicken stock — ask. Pici with ragù and crostini toscani contain meat. Bistecca is beef only.

For a day outside the city, the Chianti hills around Greve in Chianti and the Valdarno around Reggello are where much of the region's olive oil and wine comes from, and both are reachable as day trips.