Best Restaurants in Florence: An Honest Guide
Honest trattorias, contemporary bistros and the places not worth your time — an insider's guide to eating well in Florence, written for those who care about what is actually on the plate.
Cantinetta Antinori, Florence. Cantineta Antinori Image.
Florence is one of the great food cities in theory — extraordinary ingredients, a deep trattoria tradition, and a culinary history that shaped Italian cooking for centuries. The reality on the ground, however, is increasingly shaped by tourism. Menus start to look the same from one street to the next, prices creep up, and too many places rely on atmosphere and Instagram rather than what is actually on the plate.
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My personal benchmark for a truly great Italian restaurant remains Uri Sapori in Piedmont — the kind of place you build a weekend around, where cooking, ingredients and hospitality are all in perfect harmony. I have not yet found a Florence restaurant that reaches that level. But there are still places worth seeking out if you care about flavour more than hype — and this guide is my honest attempt to help you find them.
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​These are the restaurants I go to myself — places I have eaten at, returned to, and would recommend to anyone I care about. This is not a complete list of Florence's dining scene, simply an honest one.​
Trattorias & Osterie That Still Feel Real
These are the places where Florence still tastes like itself — honest cooking, real ingredients, rooms that feel lived-in rather than staged. Some are famous, some are barely known outside the neighbourhood. All of them are worth your time.​
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Trattoria Maga Magò​
Trattoria Maga Magò. Trattoria Maga Magò Image.
A small, warm dining room that feels genuinely local — the kind of place where the cooking draws on old Florentine and mountain traditions without feeling heavy or old-fashioned. Expect slow-cooked meats, handmade pasta with rich ragù, and boiled meat dishes that sound simple but are done with real care. Desserts are taken seriously here, which is rarer than it should be.
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For reservations and current opening hours, visit the official Maga Magò restaurant website.
Dalla Lola
Dalla Lola. Weird Studio Image.
Opened in 2019 by Matilde Pettini, who followed her mother's footsteps into the restaurant business — her mother runs a place just a few metres away. Matilde took over the historic site of an old latteria and tavola calda in Santo Spirito and turned it into one of the most quietly exciting places to eat in Florence. The handwritten menu changes daily, driven by the enthusiasm of the kitchen team and a genuine curiosity about Tuscan cooking beyond its most obvious expressions.
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The philosophy is simple but refreshing: traditional Florentine ingredients, reinvented with intelligence and a light touch of international influence — particularly in the use of spices. Lampredotto appears in pasta rather than in a panino. The cacio e pepe becomes tagliolini cacio e za'atar. It is Tuscany seen through a slightly wider lens, executed with real skill and served at prices that feel entirely honest. The wine list changes often and satisfies without fuss.
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For reservations and current opening hours, visit the official Dalla Lola restaurant website.
Dalla Lola. Meigan Arnone for Life&Thyme Image.
Cantinetta Antinori
The Antinori family has been in the wine business for twenty-six generations — since 1385, when Giovanni di Piero Antinori became a member of the Arte Fiorentina dei Vinattieri, Florence's Winemakers Guild. In 1506, Niccolò di Tommaso Antinori purchased the palazzo for 4,000 florins — a building designed by Giuliano da Maiano, an apprentice of Brunelleschi, the man behind the dome of the Florence Cathedral. The family has lived and worked here ever since. Since 1957, the ground floor has been home to Cantinetta Antinori — a return, as the family saw it, to an old Florentine tradition of noble families selling wine from their city residences directly to the public. If you look carefully on Vicolo del Trebbio, you can still find the family's original wine window, inscribed simply with the word Vino.
Cantinetta Antinori. Cantinetta Antinori Image.
The restaurant serves a menu built around the estate's wines and Tuscan produce of genuine quality — ribollita, crostini, bistecca — done with the quiet confidence of a place that has never needed to impress anyone. The pappa al pomodoro, mandilli al pesto and desserts are not to be missed. It is not cheap and it is not trying to be trendy. It is simply very good at what it does, in one of the finest Renaissance palaces in Florence.
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For reservations and current opening hours, visit the official Cantinetta Antinori restaurant website.
Cantinetta Antinori. Cantinetta Antinori Image.
Buca Lapi
Florence's oldest restaurant, founded in 1880 in the ancient cellars beneath Palazzo Antinori — the same palace that houses Cantinetta Antinori upstairs, though the two experiences could not be more different. Down here it is vaulted stone ceilings, vintage posters covering every wall, white tablecloths and formally dressed servers who have been doing this for decades. The menu is classic Tuscan — ribollita, pappardelle with wild boar, crostini — but the reason most people come is the bistecca alla Fiorentina: Chianina beef, charcoal-grilled, served rare. It is not cheap, and it is not trying to be anything other than what it has always been. That consistency, over more than a century, is itself worth respecting.
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For reservations and current opening hours, visit the official Buca Lapi restaurant website.
Buca Lapi. Buca Lapi Image.
Contemporary Bistros & New Florence
Florence's food scene is slowly evolving, and these are the places doing it with real intention — seasonal menus, genuine creativity and a sense that someone in the kitchen actually cares.​
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Santabarbara Desco & Cucina
Located at Via Pier Capponi, 72 a — Campo di Marte.
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Two chefs — Alessio Ninci and Lorenzo Chirimischi — spent years in high-end fine dining before deciding they had had enough of it. In September 2024 they opened Santabarbara on Via Pier Capponi: just twenty covers, a sushi bar-style counter wrapping around an open kitchen, and a menu that is never written down because it changes every day based on what the market and their producers have available. No printed cards, no set dishes, no fuss.
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The name is inspired by Saint Barbara, the Christian martyr and patron against lightning and explosions — a deliberate nod to the risk the two took in walking away from the safety of established kitchens to do something entirely their own. A year in, the room is full almost every evening.
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The food is creative, ingredient-led and surprisingly accessible — four tasting paths with names like Fulmine (Lightning, €25), Torre (Tower, €45) and Corona e Spada (Crown and Sword, €60). Dishes like cold spaghetti with oysters and black lemon, or guinea fowl with asparagus and Albufera sauce, show real ambition without the cold formality that usually comes with it. This is exactly what contemporary Florence should taste like.
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For current opening hours, visit the official Santabarbara restaurant website.
Santabarbara. Reporter Gourmet Image.
Obicà Mozzarella Bar
Located at Via de' Tornabuoni, 16.
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The name comes from Neapolitan dialect — obicà means "right before your eyes," like a freshly made mozzarella still dripping from its brine, ready to eat on the spot. The concept was born in Rome in 2004, when the New York Times declared it "Rome's and probably history's first mozzarella bar." Twenty locations later — Milan, London, New York, Tokyo — the Florence outpost remains one of the most elegant in the group, housed inside Palazzo Tornabuoni, a stunning 16th-century building designed by Michelozzo, with a beautiful shaded courtyard that makes it one of the more civilised spots on Via Tornabuoni.
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Among all the Obicà locations, Florence consistently offers some of the best food in the group — it dipped slightly after the pandemic but has returned to its previous standard. Exceptional buffalo mozzarella from Campania, good accompaniments and an excellent local wines. Works equally well for a light lunch, aperitivo or dinner — and a genuine change of pace when Florence's heavier Tuscan cooking calls for something fresher.
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For current opening hours, visit the official Obicà restaurant website.
Obicà Mozzarella Bar. Obicà Mozzarella Bar Image.
Testina
Located at Via Sant'Egidio, 29r — near the Duomo.
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Ring the doorbell and, if you have a reservation, you will be granted access into an elongated restaurant of extraordinary promise. Five tables, a single spotlight per table, beige and sage walls beneath a curved ceiling, a miniscule bar and the pink glow of the open kitchen at the end of the corridor. Chef-patron Ivan de Simone is Neapolitan by birth, Florentine by adoption — Michelin-trained, with stints at the acclaimed two-star Norwegian restaurant Under, sustainability-focused Natura in Helsinki and two-Michelin-star Caino in Maremma.
La Testina. La Testina Image.
​The philosophy is stated simply on the menu: subtract the superfluous, leave space for the ingredient, the technique and the flavour in its most authentic form. The menu is never static — written in pencil, renewed with the season. Meat chosen with rigour, fish following the freshness of the day, vegetables as protagonists. Few dishes, no concessions to the unnecessary. The natural wine list is exceptional.
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This is a very small, very serious restaurant — one of those rare Florence addresses where everything is calibrated and nothing is left to chance. Book well in advance.
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For reservations and current opening hours, visit the official Testina restaurant website.
La Testina. La Testina Image.
Gastone
Located at Via Matteo Palmieri, 24/26r — between Santa Croce and the Duomo.
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In a city centre that too often sells itself to tourism, Gastone is a quiet act of resistance. Behind the glass facade, Florence rushes past — tourists, coffee cups, shop windows. Inside, the light is softer, the wood pale, the air carrying a faint smell of charcoal and butter. Not a place built to impress, but to make you stop.
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Mattia Petri, the owner, came from wine rather than the kitchen — and it shows in everything, from the way he talks about a bottle to the way each dish is built around what it wants to drink. His wine list is a personal geography: small-producer Champagnes, great French whites, labels you will not find on the easy circuit. He treats each bottle the way a conductor treats a score — never overpowering the food, always making it resonate more clearly.
Gastone. Gastone Image.
​The kitchen follows the same logic. Fresh and dry-aged fish selected daily from trusted suppliers, raw preparations, oysters, a menu that changes with the catch and the season. The linguine with seafood is a small exercise in harmony. The dry-aged cernia with porcini and potatoes shows what happens when fish is treated with the patience usually reserved for great beef. The wine list — over 400 labels, with a particular focus on Champagne and Italian whites — is exceptional.
Florence is not a seafood city by tradition. Gastone makes a convincing case that it should be.
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For reservations and current opening hours, visit the official Gastone restaurant website.
Gastone. Gastone Image.
Simple Places That Are Still Themselves
These are the places that have never needed to reinvent themselves — simple rooms, honest prices and cooking that has fed Florence for generations. No concepts, no theatrics, just food that does exactly what it says.​​
Alla Vecchia Bettola
Located at Viale Ludovico Ariosto, 32/34r — San Frediano.​
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Opened in June 1979 by Loriano and Carla Stagi, who wanted to preserve a truly traditional Florentine cucina at a time when the city's dining scene was shifting toward something more polished. Today their son Massimiliano runs the room with the same hands-on energy his parents brought to it — communal marble tables, wooden benches, unlimited jugs of Chianti at a fixed low price, and a level of noise and conviviality that Italian guides have long described as a real Tuscan party.
Penne alla Bettola at Alla Vecchia Bettola. Taverna Tiberina Image.
​The dish people come back for — and often never order anything else — is the penne alla Vecchia Bettola. I will be honest: every time I go, I order it and nothing else. I have never once been tempted to try anything different. Whatever the secret is in that sauce, it is heavenly and entirely their own. The trippa and lampredotto are also cult classics, and the old-fashioned apple cake is not to be missed.
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Cash only, reservations are a must, always full of locals. The kind of place that reminds you what Florentine eating used to feel like before tourism changed everything.
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For current opening hours, visit the official alla Vecchia Bettola restaurant Instagram page.
Alla Vecchia Bettola. Cinzia Salvadori Image.
Gastronomia il Giglio
Located at Via dell'Orto, 24r — San Frediano.
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Part deli, part osteria, entirely neighbourhood. Mirko, the owner, runs this small San Frediano spot with the kind of infectious warmth that makes strangers feel immediately at home — and keeps locals coming back weekly. Everything is cooked fresh on the day, built around whatever seasonal produce is available, which means the menu shifts constantly and the quality stays high. The focaccia and schiacciata alone are worth the detour. Stay for a glass of wine, a plate of cheese and cured meats, or a full lunch — the tortelli with Cinta Senese ragù is not to be missed. The kind of place you stumble into by accident and spend the rest of your trip telling people about.
Gastronomia il Giglio. Francesco Galletta Image.
Aperitivo & Apericena
The aperitivo is not just a drink in Italy — it is a ritual. That hour between work and dinner when the city exhales, glasses are filled and the evening properly begins. In Florence it tends toward the elegant rather than the chaotic — a good glass of wine, a few things to eat, good company and no particular hurry. Done well, it slides imperceptibly into dinner without anyone quite deciding to let it — what Italians call an apericena, that beautiful grey area between aperitivo and cena where the best evenings tend to happen. These are the places where that happens most naturally.​
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Procacci
Located at Via de' Tornabuoni, 64r.
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Open since 1885 and one of the few places on Via Tornabuoni that still belongs to Florence rather than to fashion. This is where you come for a glass of Franciacorta and one of their famous miniature truffle panini — small, perfect, gone in two bites and immediately worth ordering another. Locals and visitors mix here in a way that rarely happens in this part of the city, standing at the bar or perched on stools, unhurried and entirely content.
Wonderful Ella at Proccacci. Procacci Image.
I will be honest: this place feels like home to me when I am in Florence. There is something about the ritual of it — the glass, the panino, the friends I made there — that I look forward to every single visit. One of those rare institutions that has survived everything the city has thrown at it and still feels entirely itself.
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For current opening hours, visit the official Proccacci bar website.
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Proccacci. Procacci Image.
Il Santino
Located at Via di Santo Spirito, 60r.
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Two doors down from Santo Bevitore, this tiny enoteca and gastronomia has been one of my favourite stops in Florence since it opened in 2008. A former wine cellar — exposed brick, wooden beams, shelves stacked with local produce, cured meats hanging behind the bar, a glass cabinet below the marble counter displaying cheeses from Italy, France, England and Belgium. Just four or five small tables and a handful of iron stools. The limited space is entirely the point.
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The wine list focuses on small local producers and changes regularly — and their panini with home-smoked salmon are something I look forward to every visit. It is the kind of place where one glass very naturally becomes two.
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People spill out onto Via di Santo Spirito with their glasses whenever the weather allows, adding to the warmth of an evening that was already going well. In the quieter months, a Thursday or Friday aperitivo here is pure joy — the street fills with well-dressed locals rather than tourist crowds, and the people-watching alone is worth the glass. In any season, at any hour, it is one of those rare places that always feels exactly right.
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For current opening hours, visit the official il Santino bar website.
Il Santino. Le Strade di Firenze Image.
More Florence Restaurants: Recommended by Our Community
Looking for more recommendations beyond this list? Our Facebook community of 95,000 Florence lovers has contributed their own favourite restaurants, trattorias and hidden spots — places shared by members who live in, work in or return to Florence regularly. These are community recommendations rather than personal ones, but the list is rich, varied and constantly updated.
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→ Join the conversation in the Florence community group
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Continue exploring Florence
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