Where locals eat

Signals worth trusting

• The menu is short and changes with the season. A trattoria doing a handful of dishes well, updated with what's fresh, is a far better sign than a laminated 12-page menu covering pizza, pasta, steak and sushi with equal confidence.
• It's a few streets back from a major sight. Rent and foot traffic near the Duomo or Ponte Vecchio shape what gets served there; walk five to ten minutes into Oltrarno, Sant'Ambrogio, or San Frediano and the ratio shifts noticeably toward places cooking for regulars.
• No one outside is trying to seat you. A tout on the street actively encouraging passersby to sit down is a reliable negative signal in Florence, as in most of Italy.
• It's busy with a mixed-age local crowd at Italian meal times (lunch from around 12:30, dinner rarely before 7:30) rather than filling up at 6pm with tourists eating on an earlier schedule.

Neighbourhoods worth exploring for this

Sant'Ambrogio, San Niccolò, San Frediano and the quieter parts of Santa Croce all have a genuine density of local trattorias — see our neighbourhood guide for the broader character of each area, which applies to their food scenes too.

Menu red flags

• Photos of every dish on a laminated menu, especially outside the centre's most tourist-heavy streets.
• A "tourist menu" (menu turistico) offered unprompted — not automatically bad, but rarely where a kitchen puts its best effort.
• Prices with no coperto (cover charge) listed anywhere — usually means it's built into inflated dish prices instead, not that there's no charge at all.