From the outside this place looks like a forgotten American cafeteria from the 1960’s. It’s in the ground floor of one of central Florence’s few hideous modern buildings – always severe and severely dirty – right near the rotunda, designed by Brunelleschi himself, that is part of the facolta of the University of Florence. The inside of the caffe is more promising: bright lime green walls are offset by nicely set tables and a buzzing atmosphere. But people don’t come for the decor, they come for the cheap, tasty hot lunch.
Caffe Brunelleschi is a perfect example of a bar-turned-lunch hot spot that I feature in the updated version of my book in a sidebar called “Lunching Like a Local.” This city is teeming with little local bars serving good, homestyle hot pastas for a pittance. How did Florentines get so lucky? It turns out that this is a fairly recent phenomenon. People traditionally eat lunch at home, and the other options were either a full-fledged sit-down trattoria meal or a quick panino on the go. But as more and more students and lavoratori/workers couldn’t make it home for lunch, bars and cafes started to meet the growing need for a cheap hot lunch. Many Italians feel they haven’t eaten if they don’t have a hot primo, and possibly even a secondo – a sandwich is a poor substitute. Soon bars that used to serve just coffee and snacks started offering primi piatti, sometimes cooked by a mamma, sometimes off the books. Now, in every neighborhood, you can find several bars like Caffe Brunellschi that are packed – packed! – with students, businessmen, and regular people. You don’t usually see many tourists in these places because they are not in any guidebook.
Caffe Brunelleschi is now less like a bar than an actual restaurant at lunch time. You are lucky if you can find a table if you arrive after 1 pm, and some people even reserve a table, which is pretty extreme for a lunch place. The menu changes daily and features an interesting mix of pastas, as well as secondi of meat and grilled vegetables. The plates of pasta are abundant – farfalle with eggplant and pine nuts, spaghetti with pomodoro, pasta with gorgonzola and radicchio … there are more choices and the choices are more interesting than at many similar places. The food is good without being great, and the prices are terrific: 4.50 euro for a pasta, and little more for a secondo. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Caffe Brunelleschi: Via Castellaccio 42r, 055-219-062.
