It's been a while, but I traveled without a Rick Steve's book on this trip. Instead, I watched his YouTube videos on Venice and Florence. In the Florence video, he goes to this restaurant with huge steaks of chiannini beef. I put it on the list of "must eat at" restaurants and it was the perfect end to our Florence days.
I'll be honest, I was hesitant for another florentine steak because the one at Antinori was a little odd. The seasoning was very herb based, like what one would put on a turkey or chicken but not necessarily a steak.
We began with wine and cheese, as all good dinners do. We ordered the house wine and I noticed that they only gave wine glasses to tables that ordered real bottles of wine. We only got the regular cups to drink from.
Bread, cheese, and fig jam are all I need to survive. Has anyone ever noticed the stale nature of Italian bread at restaurants? I know there is good bread in Europe, just not sure why Italy does this hard bread thing. Italian bread in the US is better. I would say it was just the restaurants I went to but we ate at a lot of places of all different qualities and price tiers and the stale bread seems consistent. I guess it's not stale, but hard and not fluffy or warm.
For our pasta course we ordered taglierini di pasta Fresca ai funghi porcini. I don't normally like pasta but Italy has been pretty delicious. Adam doesn't like the mushrooms so I got to eat all of them. I was already basically full when they took away the pasta and showed us our raw one kilogram of steak before sending it to the kitchen for approval.
Big steak arrived. It was delish. It was barely seasoned but had a nice grill/charring flavor and came with those big rock salt pieces. A little salt with each bite... 👌🏻The restaurant was full so it was lucky we made a reservation.
We were about to move on to dessert but...Adam was still hungry! So he ordered another pasta which I did not take a photo of. It was a bit spicy and he could not eat it as quickly as promised.
Dessert: Italian cookies with Vinsanto (dessert wine) and some sort of panna cotta thing. Dessert is such a waste of calories, I've usually had too much to drink to remember if it was actually that good. I prefer my sweets in the afternoon.
My rating of Antico Ristoro di Cambi- 4 out of 5 steaks. Service was slow, which I don't mind butttt it was hard to get the woman's attention when we needed something. The food was very good, but mostly if you want a big juicy steak. Of course, we come from the country of steaks so many I'm a tough critic on their beef. Is that as good as it gets for meat in Italy? I may never know!
