With rustic ambience, a Tuscan-inspired menu, and service doting enough to make Machiavelli buckle, Alberto Lombardi’s La Fiorentina offers skillfully prepared Florentine specialties from carpaccio to cappuccino with a tip of the fedora to the Italian hill country. The menu, designed by chefs Nicola Calamari and owner Alberto Lombardi, is modest yet impressive, with a daily crostini, salads, and a smattering of additional antipasti that include bone marrow, paper-thin beef carpaccio, scallop and shrimp spiedini, and Manila clams. Menu highlight: the crostini, eight rounds of puréed cannellini beans, roasted tomatoes, prosciutto, and lardo, a pure animal fat reminiscent of soft, thinly sliced bacon fat, that feels smooth and satisfying on a cellular level. The burrata salad surprises with roasted Hubbard squash layered with candied chestnuts and savory burrata cheese. Our biggest eyebrow raise goes to the unexpectedly meaty gran tortelloni stuffed with ricotta and porcini mushrooms and topped with braised leeks and sugo d’arrosto (sauce from the roast). Of course, the house’s signature entrée, la bistecca Fiorentina “come a Firenze”—a prime, wet-aged, 24-ounce, center-cut, Midwestern, grain-fed porterhouse—is symphonic in its complexity and heft, especially when accented by the traditional drizzle of olive oil.
For more information about La Fiorentina, visit our restaurant guide.
