Best Restaurants in Florence Italy in 2022 - Travel Addict Food Tour + Italy Vlog 2022

Florence, Italy is one of the world's hottest culinary hubs. So we're working with a local expert who specializes in luxury and assembling an itinerary that's taking us to four of the city's top restaurants. Let's start devouring. We flew out here to Italy. We are in Florence and we're traveling with our best friend, Amanda. Hi! Who is a huge foodie just like us. And we are all going to the four best restaurants in Florence. We are going to the first one tonight right now and it is a fish restaurant and we can't wait. So excited! Colt is navigating us to the restaurant. Good job getting us here, bud. Here we are at Gastone and I'm so excited because I'm very hungry for some good seafood. Gastone's open for lunch and dinner every day except Sunday. Their tasty menus of seafood pulled from the Mediterranean daily and wines from throughout Italy seem to be a perfect match for the bright, shabby chic interior in the heart of Florence. Can't wait, I'm excited. Starving. Cheers! All right, I got all our food figured out. I know exactly what we're getting. We got an amuse-bouche and this is burrato cheese on top here. Let's see what these flavors are about. It's like on top of fresh vegetables like cucumber and arugula. This is focaccia. As we say in the United States, focaccia. But it's like a whole different species. It tastes incredible here. That's like bread on a whole other level. That's something Colt would say. Colt's having the tuna tartare and Brooklyn's sticking with her standard, pasta in butter sauce. The rest of us are in the mood for seafood. This is the salmon tartare with passion fruit. Just like Phil and I. The passion fruit and the salmon are married very well. We almost always go with a restaurant's signature dish and for Gaston today, that's gonna be the salt-baked sea bass. Packing the fish in a thick layer of salt insulates it, which slows down the cooking and helps it to cook more evenly. When it's done cooking, it'll be perfectly seasoned, not too salty, after you remove the skin. That's just mind-blowing how they prepare that and they cut it and then put it on the plate and you can tell already that it's just felt off the bone of the fish as she put it on the plate and it looks so tender and juicy. This is my first time having fish prepared this way and I'm hooked. This is incredible. I'm a big fan of octopus, even though sometimes it's a little bit hard to eat it after watching Octopus Teacher, but it's not that hard. That bite was so crunchy, so crispy, so delicious. I love it. There's something about destination dining that encourages dessert. So we're gonna indulge in some authentic dolce. I got affogato, which is espresso over vanilla gelato. Perfect dessert for me. That is so good. Looks like every last drop is gone and so are we. We're gonna head on to the next place. See you tomorrow. We're going to La Giostra tonight. La Giostra. It is a Tuscan restaurant and it is under a 16th century brick vault. And I hope to get some Florentine steak on it. Maybe you will. Let's go. Woo! And tonight it's Brooklyn who gets to hone her navigation skills. I'm the navigation. La Giostra means carousel in Italian. The restaurant was given this name because this space was, 300 years ago, the winter storage unit for a carousel that was in the historic and famous Piazza dei Chiompi. Not far from here. You can even see the hollowed out stone where the carousel banner post was planted. This place was actually founded by a bonafide prince back in 1992. But since his death, it's been run by his twin sons, Dimitri and Soldano. It's a celebrity fave, as you can see by the walls of photos with people like George Lucas, Chevy Chase, John Travolta, Tim Robbins, Conan O'Brien, the Beckhams, and Michael Jordan. This restaurant is so charming. This ceiling is no joke. It's gorgeous, and it's romantic, and charming is a pretty good word. Instead of having a dedicated wine cellar, they make use of the entire dining room. In our case, the wine of choice happened to be on the wall right behind us. This one? Yeah, it's this. Ah, okay. It's all here. Okay. It's waiting for you behind you. It's the one we're gonna drink. It was sitting right here. And I'm not sure that keeps it at an optimal temperature, but the elaborate decanting process that they do quickly distracts you from any such thoughts. This is amazing. I feel like this is already my favorite restaurant in Florence, and we haven't even been to all of them yet. The bottle was fantastic, and so was the next one. Mm. Get it with spinach, potatoes, and ricotta cheese. Well, this is pretty much the biggest amuse-bouche I've ever seen in my life. Now I know we ordered too much. I thought we ordered the right amount, but we got a lot of food to try. Next up are some signature appetizers. Steak tartare, Brooklyn's favorite, in case you couldn't tell. Pecorino ravioli. And a Chianini carpaccio. Give you some of this carpaccio. Ooh. Oh. That is amazing. Is it? Yeah. That does taste like a brown butter sauce. Although it might just be from the filling. It's so rich. Like, most ravioli don't have that much filling. That's really good. And you know what I think is interesting is that true, authentic Italian ravioli most of the time looks more like a tortellini than a square shape. Oh, I just dropped this part. Florence is incredibly proud of its Bistecca Fiorentina, a traditional steak preparation requiring five simple ingredients. Olive oil, sage, rosemary, salt, and pepper. Classic Florentine steak in Florence. Doesn't get better than this. The T-bone or porterhouse cut is typically from Chianina cattle, the same ancient Tuscan breed used in the carpaccio. And it's grilled just above a bed of red-hot coals. Better than I expected. Honestly, this whole experience is wonderful. The ambiance, the wine, the pasta and appetizers. I was expecting the steak to just taste like steak. This is better than I expected, by far. That's good. Just the right amount of fat, so much flavor. Oh, wow. Every restaurant and home chef that cooks this dish will swear that theirs is the best in town. I love you. I love you too, baby. We may be getting full, but there's always enough room for dessert. We've heard great things about it. This meal has inspired us to talk about our gratitude and now more than ever we feel gratitude for this dessert. We got tiramisu for the adults to share and each of the kids have an apple tart. Oh, my gosh. This tiramisu is like foam the whole way through. It tastes like foam the whole way through. That's like a pillow. This is like a cloud of cream with coffee powder on top of it. It's delicious. This is our tradition here. We make here. We are ready to leave. We got the check. But wait, but wait, there's more. There's more. They said, before you go, we have this bottle of limoncello on the house and we're gonna have some limoncello now. Kind of a lot of it, right? Cheers, love. Cheers. What an awesome day. What a great experience. What a wonderful restaurant. We'll see you tomorrow because we're going to bed. I might have a headache. Yeah. For our penultimate meal in town, we're going to another very meat forward place, but this one happens to be right below Inspirato's new three bedroom place right here in the heart of Florence. This is La Bucchetta. La Bucchetta is Italian for little hole and it's in reference to these little wine doors that are one of Florence's many trademarks. These doors were invented in the 16th century and were used to store wine. They were used for winemaking families to discreetly sell glasses of wine to passersby along the streets of the city. Cole has already decided that he's getting Pici and Pici is really great because you don't find it in the US. It's really specific to this region, specifically in Siena, which is really not that far away. You see it everywhere. And it happens to be my favorite pasta as well. Apparently, Brooklyn's not fed up with steak yet. She's ordered the Florentine again. Tonight, we're opting for a martinis over wine. Although there's little doubt, we'll end up enjoying both. A la salute? A la salute. We got the gnocchi and it sounds amazing with this description. This is statrucchella cheese, so it's very similar to burrata, like what's in the center. So it's really stringy and gooey. And then on top is a spicy bacon and these edible flowers. Everything is edible, even though it looks very pretty. Olive oil? You're right. It's not funny. Such good gnocchi. It is handmade here. Some sauteed spinach right here. Looks amazing. It's not overly sauteed, so it still has a lot of good body and crispness to it. We also have Tuscan white beans, which is really traditional in Tuscany to have as a side dish or an appetizer with your steak. And they're cooked in olive oil. This steak we got has gorgonzola sauce all over it with walnuts. That's another really excellent steak. Our server's trying to convince us that they have the best cheesecake in Florence. Sounds sus, but we're gonna trust him. This is a warm cheesecake. You see how warm it is because it's crispy at the very end. He said, this is not your typical Cheesecake Factory cheesecake in America. Totally different. Okay, this is pretty cool. Our server's taking us on a little field trip. So, we just learned that this door from the restaurant we're at, this building was built by the same architect who built the Duomo. You remember looking at the Duomo the other day? Also, he's telling us that in these top floors was the birth of opera. That these artists would come and they would talk about poetry and music and it's where opera started. Let me tell you what else. Also, we mentioned before that the new Inspirato apartment is in this building. He's gonna let us take a look at it. Oh, this is so fun to see. So cool. This apartment, La Daphne, is a three bedroom residence. How cool. Wow. We can stay here as part of our Inspirato membership. To learn about that, by the way, you can go to followabc.com slash pass. As soon as you walk through the door, you understand that this is one of the most unique residences on the planet. The master bedroom is massive and these authentic 18th century frescoes are incredible. The great room is two stories high and has this beautiful wooden ceiling. It has an entire wall of windows all looking out to Piazza Vecchio. This location's unbeatable and it's about 3,500 square feet in all. As you head up to the top level, there's another sitting area, the kitchen, and a really cool bar. Totally, the bar. And I love that kind of presentation where it's like, you know, everyone wants the open kitchen. Like, let's do an open bar here. We're definitely adding this place to our list. Yet another good excuse to come back to Florence. So we got the best of both worlds. We got an awesome dinner and a little history lesson with a history tour. But we're all done here, so we're gonna head out. And for our only fine dining experience of the entire trip, we're going to experience the Michelin-starred Ore D'Aria. The restaurant is located behind Uffizi Gallery and just a block from Ponte Vecchio and the Arno River. But tonight, we're more interested in consuming culinary masterpieces. Buona sera. Prego. Ore D'Aria is Chef Marco Stabile's first restaurant and its first Michelin star came in the year 2010. Unlike many chef-owners who operate behind the scenes of a place like this, you'll see Chef Marco working away through the glass kitchen and he'll probably deliver some of your courses personally. The restaurant is small and seems to only have one turn per night. That would mean that all the restaurant's revenue for today is coming from the people in this room right now. We're gonna start the evening toasting with a sparkling wine, 60% Chardonnay blend. All'assalute. That's very crisp, huh? Three different flavors. They are shaped as walnuts. This is for our finger food to go with our starter wine. Pate lubric. Lime. And celery. It's good, eh? The menu has a lot of French influence, from the preparation and techniques to ingredients like the truffle, butter, pigeon, and foie. That's like a little slide with olive oil. But its structure around the past, present, and future reflects a genius that's purely Florentine. The menu is interesting because they have the past, which is a tasting menu, the present, which is a la carte, and the future, which is a vegetarian tasting menu. We are all three doing the past, the tasting menu. They also have two options for wine pairing, but that's a lot of wine, so we're just gonna get a bottle to share. Phil made an excellent choice for our bottle of wine. It's Tine Bello, which a good friend of ours gave us a bottle at one point, and we had to recreate that by getting this bottle. It is 2007. Oh, that's so unique. And this is our last night in Florence, so we are celebrating, and this is a great way to celebrate. That is just gorgeous. It is gorgeous. That is delicious. This is our mousse bouche, and it is a very fancy potato soup with a little tortellini inside. I'm excited about this because it's one of my favorite things in the world, which is foie gras, and it's foie gras cream with chestnut flour and raspberries, fresh raspberries. Wow, a little bit of an explosion of flavor. It's this dullness from the foie gras and the flour that's just totally offset by this vibrant raspberry that's on top. It's like a pop of very sharp, sweet, and sour kind of flavor. That is so amazing. This is different. This is special. I love it when chefs find a really creative and great way to do foie gras, because just searing it or serving it cold, not cutting it for me anymore, this is a really unique, creative way to serve it. I'm gonna go from top to bottom here. We have black truffle on top, a poached egg, cabbage, and then a Chianti reduction on the very bottom. And for the best in Italy, it's always the pasta. This is tortellini stuffed with beef that's been cooked and stewed in Chianti for a very long time. That is delicious. And finally, a course that is worthy of this bottle of wine. This is the beef filet, and it's on an amazing little bed of pureed celery. And once again, it has little crunched up, maybe freeze-dried raspberries on top that just really give it that little sweet-sour pop. Steak is cooked perfectly. And it has some... I'm fascinated by the olive oil drizzle on this, but right next to it is the white chocolate mousse with the rice flour. Mm, holy moly. That's probably some of the best olive oil I've ever had, and it's on top of a gelato. Mm. That just tastes like Italy. You have two of the most iconic flavors, olive oil and gelato in a single bite. And man, it's a marriage made in heaven. I love it. This experience was so refreshing because it has been a bit since we've been to a fine dining restaurant that has surprised us at every single course. And Phil especially was blown away by that last dessert course, the olive oil and the gelato. But really, each course was different, something we haven't tasted before, and innovative and just delightful. So this is our last restaurant. We're all done in Florence. When you travel to a foreign country, you expect the food experience to be part of your travel experience, probably the main part of the travel experience. So you're expecting something different, just like when you land in a new place, you want it to smell different, you wanna absorb a different culture, you wanna absorb different sights. So the food has got to transform you with your trip. So I will tell you that our four restaurants that we hit in Florence did all those things. I felt like we got a local joint with La Bucetta. I felt like we got that fish that you want when you visit a Mediterranean country like Italy. And then I felt like we got an amazing steak, Florentine at La Giostra. And now the fine dining that we just ended our episode with, Ora Daria, was that experience that I've been waiting for for a while. So we ended on the perfect note. Follow us for more food tours and episodes just like this.