Il Latini ..... a place for traditional Tuscan food. 9~12 Sep 2010 - Florence, Italy

For dining at Il Latini,  a reservation is definitely needed. The place was full and I expected so when I looked at the menu. The prices were relatively cheap compared to the stuff that we had elsewhere.  While you are seated, you are expected to at least try their house red before they show you some respect.  When we said that we would like to look at the menu before deciding on wine, the waiter actually made us wait for another 15 minutes before appearing to explain the menu written in Italian to us and subsequently taking our orders.  But they charged only 2 euros per glass of wine and wine was off some Ikea glass.

We decided to help ourselves with the red wine which seemed to please the 2 waiters serving our area and one of them moved on to take our orders.  Menu is in Italian and the waiter didn’t help us translate even though the portly-looking boss expected the waiters to help us with this.

It’s easy to know that we need to order prosciuttos as the restaurant was full of hanging hams.

When we saw him slicing plates and plates of prosciuttos at lightning speed, there's no doubt that we had to eat prosciuttos here.

We had the prosciuttos without the melons as per the norm that you would see back in Singapore and boy, these pieces of cured meat did not need the melons to bring out the flavour of the meat at all.

Another was the salami, the other Italian word that we could recognize which was quite good, fragrant with big chunks of fats embedded in the medallions rather than the small bits that you usually get in the Italian restaurants in Singapore.

The waiter, however, did manage to come through with an excellent recommendation – the Bistecca di Fiorentina.  We powered through 1.1kg of this typical Tuscan T-bone steak that was yummy to say the least.  If we were to set a bar with Il Latini’s Fiorentina steak, there’s a lot of catching up to do for most of the Italian restaurants that served the same fare at almost double the price in Singapore.

Although done medium rare, the steak was full flavoured to the core, unlike what I had eaten before.  At first, 1.1kg of meat seemed impossible to finish but at the end of the meal, I was hungry for more.


Desserts don’t seem to be the forte @ il Latini and HY seemed equally disinterested as well.  We decided to give it a pass and took a stroll to Via della Oche to GROM for gelato recommended by HY’s colleague.


Via dei Palchetti 6/r
Palazzo Rucellai
50123, Firenze, Italia
Tel : +39 055 210916
Il Latini Website