From Rome we travelled to Florence, and so will my restaurant reports. We arrived in Florence on a Sunday. This made dinner slightly complicated as a lot of restaurants in Florence are closed on Sunday. Our AirBnB host came to our rescue: she had recommendations for a number of restaurants in our general vicinity and among them was one that is actually open on Sundays: Trattoria Acquacotta. They are located a little outside the core tourist zone on Via dei Pilastri, right where it hits Via Fiesolana. Though keep in mind that Florence is much smaller than Rome, which means that if you’re visiting as a tourist, odds are good that everywhere you might want to go will be within walking distance. As it turned out, all the places we were to eat at were not only within walking distance, two were literally steps from our flat and a third was less than 5 minutes walk away. Acquacotta was far away by comparison, being about an 8 minute walk. I am happy to say that while it wasn’t the best restaurant meal we ate in Florence, it was well worth the walk.

It’s a long-established restaurant and you can feel their ethos as you enter. There’s a small, cramped dining room as you enter with the kitchen beyond; a little further in is a slightly larger (but not large) dining room with more tables. The decor is charming enough but they’re not really trying to impress you with design flourishes. The same could be said of their menu, which skews traditional (please remember though that I am not qualified to tell what was very traditional and what might have tweaked tradition a little or a lot).

If you are clocked as a non-Italian speaker you will be given an English language menu. This is useful in many ways as, like us, you may not recognize the Italian names of every component of a dish. However, it’s also not useful in other ways as the names of dishes (and some major components) are translated literally. Every stuffed pasta, for example, was rendered as “ravioli” on the English menu; pappardelle was translated as “large tagliatelle”; ribollita is not named as such; and so on. But you can solve this issue, as I did,  by asking for a copy of the Italian menu to look at alongside. This had the amusing side-effect of our server then addressing me only in breakneck Italian for the rest of the meal, completely unmoved by my responding only in English with the occasional “si” and “grazie” mixed in. Luckily, context and body language got us through the dinner.

What did we eat? We started with a platter of Tuscan salumi which included crostini with paté (I forget what the beast of origin was) and crisp panzanella with baby octopus and olives. Both were very good indeed and we enjoyed the panzanella in particular. For our primi we got two pastas and their ribollita. Their ribollita turned out to be in the very thick (pretty much sludgy) end of the continuum and split the family, with 50% enjoying the taste but not the texture. Of the pastas, the pappardelle with wild boar ragu was excellent. The agnolotti with pheasant tossed in black truffle butter was also quite tasty if not quite as good.

On to the mains. We decided to get the bistecca alla Fiorentina out of the way at our first dinner. We asked for it rare and got it pretty much cold in the centre. Very good but a lot for two adults and two young children. With hindsight it would have been better to not have got a second main but the roulade of guinea fowl stuffed with sausage, black truffle etc. was very tasty indeed.

We were very full indeed after all of the above but couldn’t resist a dessert. Selection was made easier for us by the fact that much of the list incorporated nuts of one kind or the other that our boys are allergic to. Accordingly, we alighted on their semifreddo meringa (meringue with icecream) with a crunchy sesame topping. Very nice indeed.

For a look at the restaurant, the menu and what we ate, click on an image below to launch a larger slideshow. Scroll down for thoughts on service and to see how much it all cost.

Oh yes, drinks. Two glasses of white wine and one additional glass of red for me. The boys had soft drinks. And we got a couple of bottles of still water. The total came to about 188 euros. More than a third of this was the bistecca alone. If we’d got the sirloin instead the total would have been 148. Either way, a far cheaper meal than any far inferior analog in an Italian restaurant in the US would be.

Service was both very warm/friendly on the one hand and increasingly frenzied as the evening went on and more tables were seated—at one point our server knocked a glass of wine over on the table. The warmth trumped the frenzy.

All in all, it was a very good meal. But, as I said, it was the least of our three sit-down restaurant dinners in Florence, and indeed in Italy till that point. This is not a slam: Mimi alla Ferrovia, Santo Palato, Emma, Trattoria Monti, Trattoria Pennestri: not a loser in that group. If you were to be in Florence and within easy reach of Acquacotta, I would have no hesitation in recommending a meal there.

Alright, my next report from Florence will be of dinner at one of the places right next to our flat: La Cucina del Ghianda. That’ll be later next week.