Mystery Critic
The Best Restaurants Out There - And Much More!
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Trattoria Il Messere - Florence, Italy Last Visit: Nov 2007 This place is special in two ways - 1) I pretty much lost ALL the pictures I took here due to a bug in my digital camera and 2) This restaurant was highly-recommended by the owner of our hotel, who was drunk most of the time so I assumed he must be an italian connoisseur. I asked him where would he have a bistecca florentina and he told me about this place. It turned out to be a true local Florentine restaurant (yup, no stupid wine bottles on the ceiling or a big hairy big head on the wall), very interesting experience. This is will be a brief review since I honestly forgot most of what I had..... We had a variety of dishes. The appetizers were better than the entrees. The pasta dishes and a "lasagna wrap" kind of dish were overall pretty good, and I would actually recommend the bistecca florentina here, like my hotel owner did. Compared to the other place where we had it (Trattoria Pepo), it's more flavor but a bit tougher. Both are super raw, basically eating a live piece of cow. This is the unique thing about this restaurant. Most of the patrons in this place are italians, therefore the waiters speak rather broken English and had rather "lively" manners, but I'm pretty sure they are far more typical and genuine than those who served us at ZaZa. They were overall efficient (well by italian standard) and helpful when you have special needs, and they tried hard to recommend good dishes and also tried to sell us expensive bottles of wine. The wines turned out to be great but they did cost us (see Value). AMBIENCE Most of the restaurants that we visited in Florence look like tourist traps. It is obvious that they tried hard to look cool to the tourists - exactly the kind of places in San Francisco that I would never go to. This place, on the other hand, is a nice and comfortable restaurant, but DEFINITELY not catered toward tourists. It's clean, simple and modern with nothing to distract you from food.VALUE You would think that a non-tourist-trap would have great prices, but it turned out that italians are richer than tourists. This place is a nice restaurant, so you pay for the niceties and the opportunity to dine with real well-off italians. The portions are not too big (well except the steak) and the wines, OH MAN, are like 5 fives highers than the other places that offer Tuscans of similar quality.BOTTOMLINE Alright, if you don't mind paying a bit more, AND if you actually want to dine with some genuine, authentic italians, who most likely are having real italian food, than give this place a try. If you insist on dining in tourist traps (and don't get me wrong, some of them are good!) with prociuttos hanging above your head, than this is not to place for you. BTW The bistecca florentina, IMHO, is somewhat over-rated. If you really must try it, go to a cheap place near the Mercato Centrale, like Da Mario, and have it for lunch. It'll be easier on your stomach than having it for dinner!
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