rbAA

OK, so it was a bit of an embellishment, though if you've ever lived in China and wanted good Italian or Mexican, it can be a challenge. Tacos? Never, that's too Tex-Mex. There are a few good Italian restaurants in Shanghai, one near the US Consulate's visa office, decent pizza's, and on the Bund is Goodfellas, which is also decent but much more expensive.

My intention was never to suggest Paoli's was the greatest, just wanted to get feedback on whether it was still around and some comparison to other places. I've eaten at many other places in Florence but I remembered this place was decent food at a reasonable price. 10 years can make a difference. I'll try some of the places suggested, also.

And, as with everything in life, it depends on what you like.

rbAA

Thanks, that was what I was looking for, a recent data point. I'll check out Buca while I'm there.

Perche

Since this Wiki was started 8 months ago all of the dozens of restaurants rated here are based on what would be considered recent data. Seriously, you can't go wrong. PWMTrav knows Florence. He has a love for the place.

Unlike websites like TripAdvisor or Yelp, where all of the restaurants are, "the best in all of Italy," the truth is, in most of the popular cities Italy has bad food. So many tourists shuffle through, and the majority are Italian tourists mistaken for locals who aren't looking for great Italian food because they already eat it at home or know where to get it where they live. They just want to keep their vacation budget under control, sort of like an American tourist doing a cross country trip who stops to eat at Denny's.

Mostly due to PWMTrav, the restaurant recommendations on this website are way better than what you will read about on the magazine in the plane if they are featuring Florence, way better than whatever you will read in Conde Nast, CNN Travel, or anywhere else.

The simple fact is that Italy, in most of the major cities is just full of bad food. I think that this Wiki on Florentine food really nails it (although I am still not a Florence fan).

rbAA

It is always important to get as many different opinions, but rely upon only the trusted sources. TA and Yelp, and their prodigy, consume so much time, and the reviews always seem to vary from "it's the best" to "it's the worst," for the same restaurant, so hardy a good source. Someone might have no clue as to what others may like, or on the other hand might have been having a very bad day.

That said, my experience with Paoli was extensive but maybe out of date. I've had enough substandard meals just about any and everywhere to know what I like. Sometimes, it's like staying at an IHG property. Might not be the best, but consistent, known quality and affordable. But, always open to change.

PWMTrav

I want to be clear in my assessment - for whatever my opinion is worth - Paoli isn't a bad restaurant. They execute the classics very reliably, but charge more than I'd like to pay. I don't see a menu posted online, so I can't tell you what's on it now, but I didn't see any oddball dishes when I visited. I would steer you elsewhere if you'd never been there or to Florence, but if you have memories of the place, you will probably walk out of there with a similar impression to that of the past. Paoli wouldn't make my top 10, but it is legitimately leaps and bounds ahead of some other places in the area (ex. anything in Piazza della Repubblica).

Florence is interesting. The historic center doesn't have many locals living in it - it's essentially a tourist zone with some students scattered about. You see and hear a lot of English, including on menus of restaurants that I'd consider to be very good. Pitti Gola e Cantina (and their new place, Osteria dell'Enoteca) being two examples. Ora d'Aria prints in English. Pinchiorri does on their website (can't remember if they will hand you an English menu, but I think they do).

I'm not saying the rule of thumb regarding multilingual menus isn't true - it is in most places, but in Florence I've come across enough exceptions that I don't necessarily apply it there any longer. In Florence, I instead look for other red flags such as whether they print an Italian menu at all (huge red flag if they don't), whether someone is outside trying to bring people in, whether they're open all day (but there are exceptions, like Fiaschetteria Nuvoli or the Mercato Centrale), and the location (between the Duomo and Ponte Vecchio being your highest risk of a trap).

Antonio8069

We asked our VRBO host where to eat, and he recommended the Mercato Centrale. A short walk from the Duomo, and they had lots of fresh food choices at reasonable prices. Florence was crowded with tourists, but the Mercato was full of locals, watching the soccer game. We ended up eating out twice there over 4 nights, 10-15 Euros/person.

PWMTrav

I had a plane ride with a person who turned out to be one of the owners of the concept - didn't know him before, was a random seatmate until we got talking. One of the things he was most proud of was that the Mercato Centrale was actually bringing locals back in to visit the historic center of Florence (most don't actually live there, too expensive). The place was legitimately in danger of shutting down until they opened upstairs.

At this point I've gotten to every stall more than once and can say it's some of the best food in the city, and certainly the best value.

snic

Thanks to all of you for the recommendation of Osteria dell'Enoteca. I went there with my family a couple of weeks ago. The meal was excellent, and the service friendly and competent. One reason I picked the place was because it had a lot of vegetarian options on the example menu online, but unfortunately there were fewer when we visited. My meat dishes were phenomenally good, although the vegetarian ones for my wife and kid were a bit less inspired (excepting the mushroom dish with an egg - that was amazing). The tiramisu was out of this world - made with vin santo, biscotti and no coffee. Very rich and very flavorful.

(In all we ate remarkably well in Florence, Tuscany and Rome. Generally I can't stand Italian food here in NY, but it's very different in Italy. I'm really looking forward to going back sometime.)

Perche

I'm glad you ate well! There are a lot of great recommendations in this thread.

At the risk of being provocative, do they even have Italian food in NY? I spent quite a bit of time there the last few years, and any time someone dragged me to an Italian restaurant it was definitely not food from any region in Italy, unless it was to a very expensive place, like Babo. I did reasonably well at Eataly. But in general, if you just go to an "Italian" restaurant in NYC you will not be eating Italian food as it is known anywhere in Italy.

There is even a restaurant in Milan that advertises itself as "Italian American" food. It's popular because Italian people go there to eat what they consider foreign foods like chicken parmigiana, marinara sauce, shrimp scampi, garlic bread, Italian dressing, an Italian sub sandwich, Italian wedding soup, veal parmigiana, etc. But even at that restaurant they will not serve spaghetti and meatballs. That's a red line no chef will cross. Putting meatballs on top of pasta is considered "schifo," or disgusting, and the chef would just refuse do it.

PWMTrav

Of course they have Italian food in NY. Most of it is going to be Italian-American food, and you likely won't find authentic dishes from every region, but you can find real Italian food depending on what you're specifically after.

Also, I absolutely hate the idea that Italian-American food sucks because it's somehow inauthentic. It's a variation for sure, but given that Italian cooking is about seasonality and the ingredients often available or affordable in a given region, it's no wonder Italians in the US diverged and came up with their own. It isn't bad just because it wasn't born in Italy. It can be bad for other reasons, but it's not bad by default. But I will say that NY, for all of the great restaurants that it does have, also has plenty of terrible places to eat as well. I agree that you can't just walk in anywhere, but I think that is true in most cities.

snic

I don't complain about Italian restaurants in the NY area because they are inauthentic. I've only been to Italy once (last week) so I have no basis for saying that. All I know is that every time someone drags me to one, it's the same repetitive, often heavy and (to me) pretty tasteless stuff (usually drowned in grated parmesan, which no waiter EVER put on anyone's food in Italy the entire week we were there). But even at lower-end places in Italy (by which I mean sit-down places with lots of locals and reasonable prices, not fast food joints) we had excellent meals that were flavorful and not overly greasy.

One example is Ai Marmi in Rome. It's an extremely casual mostly-pizza joint. But the pizzas are delicious and not swimming in grease the way American pizzas are. And we also ordered some fagioli al fiasco because they were vegetarian. They were incredible - who knew just plain beans (well, with olive oil and rosemary) could taste so good. They were so good my family fought over who got the last bean. You would NEVER find anything that simple and delicious in a low-end Italian restaurant in NY.

Perche

I think we are fundamentally in agreement. The only thing is, as you said, it's not Italian food. It's something else.

By careful searching I've found some decent places in NY, or I'll just go to Eataly. It's just that in NYC there's an "Italian" restaurant in every neighborhood, sometimes on every other block. I'm not saying it's bad because it's not Italian. I'm just saying it's not Italian.

When someone says, "where would you like to eat tonight?" And the other person responds, "Let's go out for Italian food." It is pretty certain that they will not be eating Italian food, but some offshoot that is about as Italian as General Tsao's chicken is to real Chinese food.

SNIC is spot on when saying nobody came over to sprinkle parmesan cheese on the food anywhere that they were in Italy. In fact, if you are having a pasta with seafood in it and you ask for parmesan cheese to be grated on top of it, the waiter will either simply refuse, or get aggravated, but put it on anyway. Fish has a delicate flavor, and parmesan cheese will completely overwhelm the flavor of any fish, although I've seen some creative, high end chefs make some shell food dishes that have a small bit of cheese.

To sprinkle parmesan cheese on any pasta is basically an insult to the chef. If the dish is one that the chef believes will have better flavor by adding parmesan cheese, he or she will have already added it to the sauce in the kitchen.

If you ask for it it will just aggravate the waiter, and the chef if he hears about it, unless you are in a very touristy place. It's like telling him or her that they didn't make a good sauce because they left something out. You are messing it up by adding parmesan cheese because it won't taste anything like the sauce he made. It's like adding salt to a dish that you haven't even tried yet because you assume the chef made a mistake in seasoning it. The chef and the waiter will cringe.

JMN57

In higher end restaurants, I'd tend to agree with you but I don't think that's necessarily true in all cases. My wife and I had a wonderful meal in a casareccia in Galatina (outside of Lecce). Wonderful, simple meal. When the pasta course came, it was very simple, pasta with a tomato sauce. Frankly, a little too plain to my taste. But they brought a chunk of parmesan cheese and a grater and put it on the table so we could add to our taste.

The pasta was steaming, hotter than any pasta I'd every had. The grated parmesan hit the hot pasta and made the tomato sauce creamy and wonderful.

At the end, they served us some arancia di Sicilia which I'd never had, an orange with a hint of vanilla in it. Fantastic. When we commented on how good they were, the wife went back to the tree in their garden and picked a dozen for us to take with us.

Perche

Absolutely, there are some dishes where the chef wants to incorporate the cheese into the sauce at the last minute at the table as a flourish. It's very different from the pre-grated cheese in a sugar container often sitting on the table in an Italian American restaurant. It's also very different that when a waiter comes up with some silver container with pre-grated cheese and a spoon and they offer to sprinkle "parmigian cheese" over your semi-warm pasta in an Italian-American restaurant. That cheese will not melt into the sauce. From the moment parmigiano-reggiano cheese is grated it begins to lose its flavor, so if it's been sitting in a sugar shaker all day it should be thrown out.

When you say the pasta was "steaming, hotter than any pasta you ever had," that means it's authentic, and you found the real thing! They put a lot of salt in the water because salt raises the boiling point of water, and will make the pasta very hot. There is a saying, "La pasta aspetta per niente," meaning pasta waits for no one.

When the pasta is ready to, "scolare," or drain the water, it has to be mixed with the sauce immediately while it is still at the temperature of boiling salt water. That way the sauce and pasta can blend into one another. If the dish is one that is supposed to have cheese, that's when the cheese would be added, while the pasta is still so hot that it will melt into the sauce and be incorporated into the pasta, although that's usually done in the kitchen.

If you go to a restaurant that serves semi-warm pasta, and a waiter wants to sprinkle "parmesan cheese" that has already been grated, and has no possibility of melting into the sauce of the pasta that has been sitting on the counter for five minutes, that is not Italian food in my opinion. That won't happen in Italy, except at maybe a place that has "menu turistica."

It sounds like you did your research and found the real stuff, and I know that because you said you were surprised at how hot the pasta was, which is as it should be.

There are not that many "ethnic" restaurants in Italy. People in Italy generally believe that no one can top their own regional food, so why should they eat anything else? In larger cities they might have a few chinese places, a few sushi places, an Ethiopian place, a few shish-kabob places, so that once in a while Italians can go for variety and try non-Italian food.

Below is the place in Milan that serves an additional type of foreign food for Italians who who want variety and don't want to go Chinese, German, Mexican, and want to eat food you don't find in Italy. I'm not saying it's bad food generically, I'm just saying it isn't Italian. Here you can find mozzarella sticks, garlic bread, Italian dressing, fettucini alfredo, baked ziti, marinara sauce, penne alla vodka, spumoni, and other non-Italian food that you can only find in the USA. Not spaghetti and meatballs, which no one in Italy would imagine could go together.
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en...OqC6UQpx8IfjAK

PWMTrav

You're reinforcing a very important (to me) point: In Italy, the floor on bad food is higher than it is in the US. That is, the worst place in a given city in Italy is likely better than the worst place in a US city. Their processed, frozen crap tends to be better than our processed frozen crap

I'm not saying you ate at those kinds of places on your visit in Italy or anything like that. But I have, and I will tell you, they are not as bad as they should be.