florence: da nerbone

when you look up on good eats in florence you will always come across da nerbone a famous food stall in mercato centrale. i love that florence has an accessible market. it is filled with italian food items, it felt like i was in a specialty store...but then again these are normal food items in italy!

but i digress, da nerbone is an institution in florence. they serve one of the quintessential florentine dishes - lampredotto. it's the cow's stomach. you know me, i love offal =). so when i read about this i knew i had try it.

panino lampredotto

lampredotto is served in a sandwich, but you can also opt to just order it sans the bread. i requested the two sauces as everyone recommended. salsa verde and salsa piccante - one is parsley based and the other is chilli based but it's only a bit spicy. i find the bread crusty and perfect to absorb the juices of the lampredotto. other reviews recommend bagnato wherein the entire sandwich is dipped in the broth.

it's a bit bland. but i like the texture of the lampredotto, i wonder whether they can add more sauce for free :D.

panino bollito

the bollito is basically like a roast beef sandwich, thin beef slices with the same sauce as the lampredotto. i didn't get to try this anymore because i was stuffed with the lampredotto.


not exceptional, but it's a good cheap eat and it's very filling too.

da nerbone

mercato centrale

florence, italy

florence: la capanna

la capanna is right next to our b&b and it's a place i've read about in one of the blogs i follow. my first visit was when my parents didn't want to eat dinner and decided to eat fruits. i, on the other hand wanted a comforting meal. so i went downstairs and ate by myself...wee deliverance hahaha!

i wanted to eat rice, i was actually avoiding any wheat/gluten so i opted for their one and only rice meal. kept my fingers crossed on this one.

beef stew with rice pilaf and roasted potatoes. it was decent actually. the beef stew was more like beef cooked in gravy, the rice pilaf was more like plain white rice but surprisingly fluffy and the roasted potatoes? were the best! there was something different with the potatoes they were soft inside and very crisp on the outside i'm actually thinking they were store bought frozen potatoes that were deep fried, but i didn't care, the rosemary and garlic made a huge difference. 

second time was a lazy night again but my parents joined me. we haven't eaten pizza and we've been in italy close to a week already! so we had pizza for dinner. i was tempted to order gluten free pizza but the price is twice as much as a regular pizza so i said, screw my diet!

marinara pizza - my mom loves plain pizza, and this surprisingly flavorful. it was really good if you want a light pizza this one didn't have cheese so she was really happy on how plain it was.

pizza melanzana -  i thought it would have cooked eggplants, but i was wrong. the eggplants were topped raw on the the pizza before cooking. the thing is, i like the caramelization of eggplants when they are cooked with a little oil, so this one turned out to be boring and cloying because the eggplants didn't add any dimension to the flavors.

spaghetti bolognese - because my dad can't get enough of spaghetti...actually he's easy to please. he can survive in europe eating just sandwiches or pastas or chicken mami haha. almost the same as zaza's but has more tomato flavor.

la capanna

via cavour 112/R

florence, italy

http://www.la-capanna.it/