Florence Food Tour

Three to four hours, six to eight stops, and the route matters more here than in any other Italian city, because Florence's centre is a dense field of restaurants aimed at people who will never come back. Tours that stay between the Duomo and Piazza della Signoria are working with poor material. Tours that cross into the Oltrarno (San Frediano, Santo Spirito) or east to the Sant'Ambrogio market are working with the real thing.

A good route: the ground floor of the Mercato Centrale, which is still an actual market with butchers, tripe stalls and cheesemongers; a lampredotto cart for a sandwich of the cow's fourth stomach, simmered, chopped, dunked in its own broth and dressed with salsa verde, the single most Florentine thing you can eat and about €5; schiacciata, the flat salted bread, with finocchiona and pecorino; crostini neri, chicken liver on toast, at a wine bar; a seated plate of pappardelle al cinghiale or ribollita; and cantucci with Vin Santo, or gelato from a place that keeps its tubs covered rather than piled into pastel mountains.

Some tours include a bistecca alla fiorentina dinner. Read those listings carefully. A proper fiorentina is a T-bone at least four fingers thick, cooked rare, sold by weight from a Chianina or Maremmana animal: a portioned steak included in a $90 tour price is not that, and cannot be.

One more honest note: the famous sandwich shops with hour-long queues in the centre are good and not extraordinary, and the queue is a social-media artefact. Any competent guide will take you to an equivalent counter with no line.

Group tours run $70 to $110 (€65 to €100) for three to four hours with six to eight tastings. Evening tours with wine at each stop are $95 to $140 (€90 to €130). Tours that include a seated bistecca dinner run $130 to $190 (€120 to €175), and at the bottom of that range the steak will be a portion cut, not a shared T-bone.

Private tours are $240 to $450 (€225 to €420) per group. Market-and-cooking combinations, starting at Sant'Ambrogio or the Mercato Centrale and ending with lunch you cooked, are $150 to $220 (€140 to €200).

For reference when eating alone: a lampredotto sandwich is €4.50 to €6, a plate of ribollita €9 to €13, and a real bistecca €50 to €70 per kilo with a 1.2kg minimum, which feeds two or three.

Late September through November is the best stretch: grape harvest, the first olive oil pressed from late October, mushrooms, truffle season starting, and temperatures that make walking pleasant. April to early June is the other good window.

July and August are the worst combination in Italy of heat and crowds: Florence traps warmth between its stone facades and the centre is at capacity from 10am. Winter is cheap, quiet and the right season for ribollita, which is a cold-weather dish and should be treated with suspicion in July.

Day of week matters. Sant'Ambrogio market is mornings only and closed Sunday; the Mercato Centrale ground floor closes Sunday and is quiet Monday. Many traditional restaurants close Sunday evening and Monday. A Sunday-afternoon food tour in Florence is working around a lot of shut doors.

GetYourGuide and Viator carry most of the inventory, with a smaller number of operators selling only through their own sites. Because Florence has relatively low search volume for food tours but very high visitor numbers, listings skew toward big operators running frequent departures: check the group cap, which is often 15 or more.

The questions worth asking before booking: does the route leave the centre, is there a seated stop, and what is the exact steak arrangement if the tour claims one. Ask for the neighbourhoods by name. An operator that will not tell you the route before you pay is telling you the route is not the selling point.

One to two weeks ahead in high season; a few days is fine from November to March.

The Oltrarno (San Frediano and Santo Spirito) is where to stay if you care about eating. It is across the river from the monuments, ten minutes on foot from everything, and still has neighbourhood restaurants and artisan workshops. Santa Croce and the Sant'Ambrogio area on the eastern side are the other good option, more residential, with the best food market in the city on the doorstep.

The blocks between the Duomo, the Uffizi and Ponte Vecchio are the most convenient for sightseeing and the worst for dinner: the density of tourist-menu restaurants is higher there than anywhere else in Italy.

If you are willing to use the train, Florence also works as a base for the wider region, but the reverse is not true: sleeping in a Chianti agriturismo and coming into Florence for dinner means a 45-minute drive back on dark, winding roads.

Lampredotto and trippa alla fiorentina, from a cart, standing up. Ribollita in winter: bread, cavolo nero and beans, cooked one day and reboiled the next, which is what the name means. Pappa al pomodoro, panzanella in summer, both built on the region's unsalted bread. Crostini di fegatini. Pappardelle sulla lepre or al cinghiale. Peposo, beef stewed with a startling quantity of black pepper. Schiacciata all'uva in September, a flatbread pressed with wine grapes.

And bistecca alla fiorentina, ordered correctly: by weight, minimum 1.2kg for two or three people, rare, no sauce, no request for well done, which good places will refuse outright and are right to.

What to skip: any restaurant with a menu in six languages and photographs, fettuccine Alfredo (an American dish), and the upper floor of the Mercato Centrale, which is a food court opened in 2014 rather than a market. It is fine for a quick lunch and it is not what anyone means by a Florentine market.