It’s been almost ten days since I posted a report on our first meal out in Florence (at Acquacotta). I’d hoped to get this report on the second up last week but it’s been a hectic week on my program in Ireland, as we travelled from Dublin to Belfast for a week. Now that I’m almost set to return to Dublin (where the family have been chilling), here is that second report. It is of dinner at La Cucina del Ghianda, which was located mere steps from our flat on via dell’Agnollo. Not only was it conveniently located, it also came highly recommended from a few directions. And so I’d made a reservation (via Google) as soon as our dates were set, and we were very much looking forward to eating there. I am glad to report that it indeed turned out to be a very good meal.

If Acquacotta is an old-school trattoria down to its interiors, Ghianda very much looks like a hip contemporary restaurant. There’s some outdoor seating as well as two dining rooms inside. We arrive a little after they opened and were seated in the smaller dining room, which was very comfortably cooled. We perused the wine list, ordered a couple of glasses of wine and got down to examining the menu. The menu is more or less the same size as at Acquacotta and nor are they doing anything very untraditional here. The main attractions are Florentine and Tuscan mainstays of one kind or the other, and that is mostly what we got.

Along with the bread (very good) they set down an amuse of hummus (I think they called it that—at any rate it was indistinguishable from hummus). To this we added the following antipasti: a very good caprese and two excellent plates of crostini. The first involved a paté of smoked mackerel and the second thinly sliced beef tongue with mayonnaise and salsa verde. The children liked the latter more, the parents slightly preferred the former. We also got an order of sarde in saor: sardines that are first fried and then left to steep with onions in vinegar.

For primi, two pastas and an order of lasagna. The lasagna was layered with a beef ragu and was rather good. The ragu of sausage and fennel that the tagliatelle was tossed in was even better. Our pick for the best of this round, however, was the fettucine allo scoglio (or mixed seafood). You might think it an odd thing to eat seafood in Florence but the city is not that far from the Tuscan coast. We closed the savoury courses with an order of tonno del Chianti. Despite the name, this involves not tuna but pork—but the pork is slow cooked till it falls apart and resembled tuna. Served atop white beans, this was dynamite.

After all this we found ourselves uncharacteristically too full for dessert. Or maybe that’s because we’d made a gelato stop a little later in the afternoon than we should have with dinner plans on the horizon. All that remained then was to to pay and trundle a very short distance home.

For a look at the restaurant and what we ate, click on an image below to launch a larger slideshow. Scroll down to see how much it all cost, what we thought of the service and to see what’s coming next.

Oh yes, wine. We had two glasses. The missus had a Tuscan white and I had an orange wine from Puglia. Both were very good. Service was likewise very good. Our server was quite fluent in English and very forthcoming with descriptions and recommendations. The restaurant filled up steadily as the evening went on and at one point there was a very large group in briefly for what seemed like one stop on a food tour—but she never lost sight of us.

Price? A very reasonable 121 euros. By this point we’d stopped making the dollar conversion and comparison to Italian restaurants in the US (and particularly the Twin Cities). I leave that as an exercise for you if you’re so inclined. All in all, a very good meal, if not quite as good as our best meals in Rome in a similar vein (see Santo Palato, Trattoria Monti and Trattoria Pennestri), and I’d recommend them highly if you’re within easy range.

Next up from Italy will be a report on a far more casual meal. I hope to get that up this week as well, but let’s see how that goes.