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Where to Eat in Florence: Trattorias, Tripe Carts, and the Mercato

Skip the queue for the steak everyone Instagrams. Real where to eat in Florence means tripe carts, family trattorias and the upstairs Mercato Centrale. Here's how to eat like you live there.

Short on time? The the day-by-day Florence itinerary turns all of this into a route you can actually walk.

Everyone wants to know where to eat in Florence and everyone expects me to say bistecca alla Fiorentina, the big bloody T-bone, and yeah, it’s good. It’s also overpriced in the wrong places and you’ll wait an hour for the privilege. Let me tell you what Florentines actually eat instead, which is mostly cow stomach. Stay with me.

The first proper meal I had in this city was a tripe sandwich eaten standing up, juice running down my wrist, bought from a cart by a man who refused to speak English on principle. Best four euros I’d spent in Italy. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

Florence’s true street food is lampredotto — the fourth stomach of the cow, slow-simmered, sliced, stuffed into a bread roll that gets dunked in the cooking broth so the top half goes soft. You get it with salsa verde (green sauce) and a hit of spicy oil. The carts are called lampredottai and they’re scattered around the city.

The one by the Mercato Nuovo near the bronze boar gets all the tourists; it’s fine but there’s always a crowd. I send people instead to the cart near Sant’Ambrogio market on the east side, where the line is half locals on their lunch break and nobody’s filming it. Order it “bagnato” (dunked) and “piccante” (spicy). Around 4 to 5 euros. Eat it there, don’t walk with it, you’ll wear it.

If tripe genuinely isn’t your thing, the same carts do a boiled-beef sandwich called bollito that’s much milder. But you came to Florence. Be brave.

Here’s the move most people miss. The whole grid around the Duomo is a tourist tax. Walk south over the Ponte Vecchio (or better, the next bridge over, Ponte Santa Trinita, which has the view of the Ponte Vecchio you actually want) into the Oltrarno — “across the Arno” — and prices drop and quality goes up. It’s the artisan quarter, workshops and wine bars, fewer menus with little flag icons.

This is trattoria country. A real Florentine trattoria is loud, the tablecloths are paper, the wine comes in a half-litre jug, and the menu changes with the day. Get the ribollita (a thick bread-and-bean-and-kale soup, peasant food, gorgeous in winter), or pappa al pomodoro (tomato-and-bread, basically), or hand-rolled pici pasta with a garlicky sauce. These dishes exist because Tuscans hate wasting stale bread, and honestly they turned thrift into an art form.

I won’t name my favorite because the last time a writer named it the queue tripled and the owner stopped being nice to me. But I’ll say this: it’s near Piazza Santo Spirito, it has maybe nine tables, and they do a peposo — a black-pepper beef stew that bricklayers used to eat — that I think about on the flight home.

The big covered market near San Lorenzo is two completely different things stacked on top of each other, and most visitors only do one.

Downstairs is the real market — butchers, cheesemongers, fishmongers, produce, the whole noisy morning trade. This is where you buy a wedge of pecorino, some finocchiona (fennel salami), a hunk of bread, and assemble a picnic for a third of what a sit-down lunch costs. Go before noon while it’s actually working.

Upstairs is a modern food hall, open late, with stalls doing pizza, fresh pasta, fried stuff, gelato, the lot. It’s a touch touristy and not cheap, but it’s reliable, it’s open when other places shut for the afternoon, and it’s genuinely good for a group that can’t agree on one cuisine. The fried-food (fritto) stall up there is my weakness — squid, artichokes, whatever’s going, salty and hot.

And the the gelato thing — quick rule, ignore the places near the Duomo with the giant fluffy mountains of bright pink stuff, that’s pumped full of air and dye. Real gelato sits flat in covered metal tins. Find one of those. Get the pistachio and look at the color: it should be dull olive-green, not radioactive.

One more thing about the Mercato area while you’re there. The streets around San Lorenzo are also leather-market central, all those stalls of jackets and belts. Most of it’s tat aimed at tourists, but it makes a useful landmark, and right behind the stalls are some genuinely old lunch counters that have been feeding market workers since before any of us were born. Look for the ones with no menu in English and a queue of guys in aprons on their break. That’s your spot. They’ll do you a plate of pasta and a glass of rough red for not much, and you’ll eat better than anyone sitting in the pretty square paying triple.

Coffee and a pastry standing at a bar (sitting costs extra, locals never sit). Lampredotto cart around 11 before the rush. A picnic from the Mercato downstairs for lunch by the river. Aperitivo around 7 — a Negroni, invented in this city, with the free snacks. Then a long Oltrarno trattoria dinner. That’s the day. That’s the whole city in your mouth, and you’ve spent maybe forty euros.

Skip the big-name steakhouses and the laminated menus. Florence feeds you best when you eat where the bread is stale on purpose and the stomach is the point.

Eat the tripe, cross the river, and never sit down for your coffee — that’s how you eat Florence like you live here, not like you’re passing through.

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