My wife and I just returned from two weeks in Florence. We found “The Food Lover’s Guide to Florence” by Emily Wise Miller to be indispensible and recommend it to anyone spending more than a couple of days in Florence. The book does a really good job organzing the restaurants into the main sections of the city. We went site seeing taking the book with us. When we wanted to eat (lunch in particular) we would break out the book, look at the recommended restaurants for the area we were in and made our selections. While we disagreed with a couple of her recommendations, we found this aspect of the book to be very useful.
Of the many restaurants we went to, we liked Cibero the best and Quattro Leoni the next. We had a fine dinner at La Giostra, but we were seated at 10:45 p.m. despite a 9:30 p.m. reservation. We felt like we got the “bum’s rush” at Il Latini (with them pushing the bottle of wine placed at the table and them asking whether we wanted the “extended” (read expensive) appetizers before being presented with the menus), but the lunch we ordered was good. We didn’t go to Enotica Pinchiorri given the price tag and the inconsistent opinions expressed here and other bulletin boards.
P.S. Right now the exchange rate is a real pain in the ass.