How to Eat Florence

A STUNNING VIEW
OF THE PONTE
VECCHIO BRIDGE
how t o e at
florence
Want to eat like the Florentines?
Just brush up on your Italian and follow them.
By Leigh Newman
Photography by Stefano Amantini
LET THE
TRANSLATING
BEGIN AT CIBREO
florence
PRE-DINNER RUSH
AT CIBREO
T
his is a true crime story—and the crime is meal
fraud. Many travelers believe that you can’t get a
bad dish in Italy, and certainly not in Florence—
with its straightforward Tuscan cuisine. But let
me tell you, there are crooked chefs out and
about in the city of Botticelli’s angels. Olive oil is diluted. Meat is sliced to a mere, thin suggestion of fat. Or so
I find out in front of the Santa Maria Novella church
one afternoon. The sun is shining over the piazza.
Pigeons pick at bread crumbs near the fountain—bread
crumbs that look less stale than what I am eating. Not
that this is a fancy dinner—just a prosciutto sandwich at
an outdoor caffè, accompanied by a glass of vinegary
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white wine—yet the tab comes to an absurdly high $15.
I’d like to say that I’m calling for the carabinieri, but I’m
not. The truth is, I am embarrassed. (I should know better than to plop down and eat without research.) Plus, I
am tired from museum going, leather shopping, and
detective work at certain designer-clothing boutiques.
Thanks to the high volume of tourists in Florence,
you can’t just sit down to a good meal without confronting a menu in seven languages, and recipes that
are dumbed down for foreigners. At the same time,
there are very few “undiscovered” trattorias. Everybody
in this town—Florentine and otherwise—knows the
good places to eat. It’s a small, ancient city. New restau-
FLORENTINES LINGER
AT CAFFÈ PASZKOWSKI
rants don’t open all that often, and old restaurants
seem to have been around since the Renaissance. The
trick here is simple: follow everybody else to dinner, but
once you arrive, only order in-the-know dishes.
And where is everybody? They’re in restaurants that
cook in a surprisingly home-style fashion or they’re at
home, eating with friends. For all its David-like perfection, Florentine food isn’t about refined sauces or
impossible-to-replicate cooking techniques. The genius
of any meal here is in the purity of flavors—the taste of
rosemary or olive oil or lemon, but not all of these in
the same dish at the same time. Here, less is more.
Unless, of course, you’re talking about that disappoint-
ing prosciutto sandwich of mine—with hardly enough
flavor to attract the attention of a hungry pigeon.
Most people know that Cibreo typifies Florence.
Food magazines know it; foreign and local foodobsessed folks know it; and the guy hawking fake
Gucci bags on the sidewalk knows it. Why? Because
the food here exemplifies what’s best about Florentine cuisine. Ingredients are pure. Cooking methods are simple. (In fact, chef Fabbio Cibreo originally
opened the kitchen using only a wood stove.) What’s
complex are the variety of market-fresh ingredients
and how they are composed in the kitchen.
For visitors, this restaurant (or rather, complex of
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CLAMORING FOR
CUTS AT THE
CENTRAL MARKET
PIGEON WITH FRUIT
GELATIN AT CIBREO
florence
AN EVENING AT
FIASCHETTERIA DA NUVOLI
REFLECTIONS
INSIDE
LA SOSTANZA
CROSSING THE
PONTE VECCHIO
LIFE NEAR SANTA
TRINITÀ BRIDGE
restaurants, including a formal dining room, a more
casual trattoria, a grocery store, and a newly opened
dinner theater) provides an opportunity to try “dishes
that you would eat with your Tuscan grandmother,” as
Cibreo describes it. Which is true, although a few raretuna dishes have appeared on the menu, which is
what happens when a restaurant anywhere becomes
well-known. My ordering advice applies to all
Florentine eating spots: Stick to the classics, and eat
what Florence knows and has known for centuries.
This is a traditional Renaissance city; it’s not the center of avant-garde food or lifestyles. Mostly we’re talking about dishes with just a few very fresh components
(which no one will reveal because the recipes are held
dear), punctuated by one or two ultra-powerful flavors. Some of the courses may include minestrone (a
bean-rich vegetable soup), ribollita (a thick bean stew
with bread and black cabbage), any of the grilled
meats or organs (lamb’s brain, liver, kidneys, tripe),
any of the pork sausages (mixed with highly classified
spices), and plates of salami for an antipasto. Note the
theme: Meat, beans, bread, fresh herbs.
Another truth to understand before ordering is the
crucial significance of seasonal produce. Some dishes,
such as panzanella, a pungent tomato-and-bread salad,
are warm-weather favorites. You might see it listed in
a guidebook as “typical cuisine,” but it won’t appear
on the winter menu of any self-respecting eatery. So
how do you recognize the kind of Florentine restaurant that garners respect? Like Cibreo, it’s a spot
that’s full before eight o’clock—bucking Italy’s golden rule of dinner at nine. True to this reformed form,
I arrive at Cibreo’s casual trattoria (which usually has
more Florentines sitting at the tables than fat-wallet
tourists, unlike the more formal dining room) at
around seven-thirty. The dozen or so wood tables are
packed family-style, elbow-to-elbow. Interior decoration consists of a string of artful red peppers strung
across the ceiling. Somehow, the place manages to
feel like a typical no-frills trattoria, even when the
waiter speaks French, English, and German. The
menu, however, is solely in Italian (a strong sign of a
place that doesn’t sell out to tourist buses).
Dinner begins with a local custom: toast smeared
with dark, rich chicken-liver pâté. The first “official”
courses are simple: a farinata or “baby’s food,” according to Cibreo—it’s a porridge-like grain that’s absolutely stinking with fresh garlic and cheese—and a light,
refined version of rosemary polenta, which many chefs
boil into a tough mass of rubber. A customer’s taste
buds would have to be on sabbatical not to be overwhelmed by the flavor of olive oil in the dish. The fact
that olive oil works almost as an herb may sound
strange, but this is a fresh-pressed, farmer variety from
a local olive grove—not a wannabe organic grocery.
And now it’s time for homemade pork and veal
sausages served with (you guessed right) white beans
stewed in a tomatoey-garlic sauce. But here’s a surprise: a very old, even ancient, recipe—cold chickenneck sausage combined with a paprika mayonnaise.
Desserts, however, are a little less inspired and a little
less traditional as well (as a flourless chocolate cake
continued on page 122
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