Florence . Food & Dining . Family of Four . Bistecca alla Fiorentina . $181 . Top 3 Splurge of the Trip
Bistecca alla Fiorentina is one of those dishes that has a ceremony attached to it, and the ceremony is part of the meal. At Steakhouse Da Aldone in Florence, the server walks the raw cut over to your table on a wooden board before they fire it. He’s in a white shirt with a red apron strap, hands the bone toward you for inspection, and waits for you to look at it. You nod. They take it back to the grill.
The four of us paid about $180 for the family that night. If you’re going to Florence and you eat meat, you owe yourself one proper bistecca, and Da Aldone is the place to get it. This is what happens when an Italian steakhouse decides to be specifically about the steak.
This article is not sponsored. We paid for every plate ourselves, and we didn’t tell the restaurant we were going to write about them.
The Cut
Da Aldone gives you three options on the cut. Heifer is the most traditional. Black Angus is the option a lot of American visitors gravitate toward because it’s the cut they recognize. Chianina IGP is the local Tuscan specialty, the famously large white cattle that Tuscany breeds specifically for this dish. You can talk through them with the server. He’s there for the conversation, not to upsell.
However you choose, the bistecca is going to come out one way: blue-rare in the middle and properly charred outside. That’s not a preference. That’s how the dish is supposed to be cooked. If you’re squeamish about deeply rare beef, you’ll have a tough time with this. The interior should look like the meat just changed colors. The flavor is in the char, the bone, and the marrow that comes out when you dig in.
The Eat
I’ll be honest. We came to Da Aldone after a heavy lunch earlier in the day, and we knew going in we were not going to demolish a Tuscan T-bone for four people in one sitting. We didn’t try to. We ordered, we ate what we could, we asked them to box the rest. The half-bistecca that came home with us went into the Airbnb fridge that night.
That’s what you’re paying for. The crust on the outside, the blue-rare interior on the inside, no compromises between the two. The slicing is done at the kitchen, the board comes out hot, the meat keeps cooking from the residual heat of the slate while you dig in. Eat from the bone outward, leave the bone with the marrow last.
Here’s the surprise. The cold leftover Florentine T-bone we ate at the Airbnb the next afternoon was somehow better than the hot meal at the restaurant. The fat had set, the flavors had concentrated, and at room temperature out of the fridge the meat tasted like a different dish entirely. That isn’t a typical move. Most steakhouses, the leftover is a leftover. At Da Aldone, the leftover was a bonus meal. Vika and I both thought the cold version was the more memorable bite.
The Practical With Kids
One specific piece of advice if you’re traveling with a family. Do not make Da Aldone the second big meal of a Florence day. Leave room. A proper Fiorentina is heavy and you’ll only do it justice if you walked in genuinely hungry. We made the mistake of having too much already that day, and we walked out with a half-steak even though it was wonderful.
Josh and Emily liked the ceremony of the raw-meat presentation a lot. The visual of the server with the wooden board is a memory the kids will keep. The eating itself, my teenagers were less excited about the deeply rare middle than I’d hoped, but that’s a function of being used to American medium-well grilling, not anything wrong with the dish. Vika and I were on it.
Verdict
Da Aldone is where you go in Florence if you want to do the bistecca alla Fiorentina properly. Trattoria Zà-Zà also serves a respectable bistecca and it’s a perfectly fine choice if you’re already booked there, but Da Aldone is dedicated to the cut. The presentation is the meal. The leftovers are the bonus.
Eat it. Leave room. Take the leftovers home. Eat them cold the next day.
This standalone review is part of our Italy food spend roundup for a family of four, where Steakhouse Da Aldone earns a top-3 splurge slot alongside Cantinetta delle Terme and Ristorante Ad Hoc.
If you’ve eaten bistecca alla Fiorentina at Da Aldone or anywhere else in Florence, tell me which cut you’d pick and what you think about leftover-Fiorentina-cold the next day. Genuinely curious whether ours is the unusual experience.
