Among the most unpretentious dining spots are the holes-in-the-wall known as bucche (literally, "holes"), which Florentines of every class treasure. At the Buca dell’Orafo (28r Volta dei Girolami; 011-39-055-213-619), a few steps from the Ponte Vecchio, the owner and one waitress handle the whole (tiny) dining room half a story below street level. Here Elizabeth and I shared an order of crostini toscani spread with a paste of chicken livers, anchovies and olive oil (some cooks include the chicken’s spleen; we didn’t ask). Elizabeth had chunks of roasted lamb that looked as if they had been butchered with an ax but yielded yummy caramelized bits and a few very rare larger pieces. My calf’s liver, on the other hand, was beautifully cut, an eighth of an inch thick, glossed with sage-scented butter. Such dishes might have been cloyingly heavy in summer but were ideal on that chill and gusty afternoon.
You certainly don’t have to pay a fortune for an authentic meal. Another small, unassuming restaurant with excellent, hearty food is the Ristorante del Fagioli (47r Corso Tintori; 011-39-055-244-285), where, at the end of your dinner, the waiter simply eyeballs your 1.5-liter fiasco of red and scribbles a charge on your check; in our case it was about four dollars. (Would that a few American restaurants understood the idea of good, cheap wine!)
Sampling the city’s soul food, especially tripe in all its magnificent permutations, also allows you to get deeply Florentine. The Osteria Tripperia Il Magazzino (20r Via dei Sapiti; 011-39-055-215-969) specializes in Tuscan home-style cooking, as does Da Nerbone (Mercato Centrale; 011-39-055-219-949), a clangorous lunch-only stall in the Central Market that serves lusciously drippy sandwiches of boiled brisket, glorious arista (roast pork) and tripe stewed with tomatoes.
The best of all our excursions into the unaffected yet conscious rusticity that is so typical of Tuscan food was L’Antico Noè . (6r Volta di San Piero; 011-39-055-234-0838). Its every surface was densely covered with nuttily incongruous artifacts (unstrung tennis rackets, a tarnished bugle, an old Coke cooler, a tom-tom); its owner, Massimo Torelli, looks exactly like the guy who would so decorate the joint, and his mixed salumi, his focaccia, his deep-fried artichokes, his flattened-and-fried pork chops are all impeccable. Great fried food is one of the hardest things to find anywhere; L’Antico Noè gets it crisply, greaselessly right. It was just the kind of place we’d been looking for, and even more fun because we had stumbled upon it, under a rather gloomy, seedy archway.
We also went to three more-upscale restaurants of extraordinary quality, rarely seen in guidebooks. One such gem was Ristorante Cafaggi. (35r Via Guelfa; 011-39-055-294-989); years ago a shy concierge had confessed to me his family’s devotion to this studiously understated spot. It is pure 1950s in style — plain paneling, beige draperies — but pure Tuscan classicism in its cooking. You won’t see scarecrow supermodels and silk-scarved designers here. The crowd tends more toward the stolid, tweedily clad grown-ups of the neighborhood. Among the standard winter comfort dishes are chickpea crêpes stuffed with caprino cheese and marjoram, spinach-ricotta ravioli in walnut sauce, winter-greens salads and crunchy batter-fried red mullets, each biting its own tail.
In the more fashionable haunts of the Oltrarno neighborhood, around Santo Spirito Square, Il Santo Bevitore (66r Via Santo Spirito; 011-39-055-211-264) is spare and modernist in design, deftly combining the Florentines’ proclivity for simplicity and their aptitude for high style: lots of glass and wood, theatrical lighting, the unmistakable buzz of a place to be seen in. The diners were young and chic, the food as light as you are apt to encounter in this city in winter. An appetizer called “four prosciuttos” was not really four kinds of ham but rather a selection of salumi: prosciutto, lonzino, capocollo and some sort of salty, scrumptious pork belly. The velouté of Jerusalem artichokes with rosemary oil was a fascinating soup. The osso buco with risotto Milanese was by the book (and flawless), but the unusual beef tartare was mixed with spicy thin-sliced vegetables. Desserts were grand — pineapple sorbetto with citron sauce, chestnut crêpes with mascarpone and a glass of sweet Passito. The wine list was long, rich and very reasonably priced.
Our final stop was well off the beaten path in the quiet western reaches of Florence, about a thirty-minute stroll along the river from the center of town. The Trattoria Vittoria (52r Via della Fonderia; 011-39-055-225-657) breaks the Tuscan rule that you can get prime seafood only at the seaside; a mountain of fish and shellfish glistened in the entrance hall. The antipasto di mare seemed never to cease, as dish after dish was rushed from kitchen to table as soon as it was taken off the stove: marinated anchovies, shrimp croquettes, warm stewed octopus, steamed mussels, roasted razor clams and more, and more, accompanied by schiacciata, the irresistible Florentine cracker bread. Our waitress happily led us back to the fish mountain to choose our spigola (sea bass) and decide how we wanted it cooked (charcoal grilled). At meal’s end, a bottle of grappa and two small glasses arrived: on the house but fierce enough to flatten you if you dared more than a few delicate sips.
