Meaning “butter and anchovies,” you wouldn't find this little bistro wandering down the obvious streets. But the food here, as you can imagine, is fish-based, and the quality, creativity, and value is simply terrific. The menu delights with fried appetizers, flavorful raw small plates, Venetian-style cicchetti, delicious pastas, and seasonal touches on mains. It’s a very casual spot, and a win for those into small plates and seafood pastas done incredibly well.

For years, Simone Cipriani (of Santo Graal) has been one of the few chefs revered for creative cuisine. Recently, he made the bold move to leave and open his own restaurant, Essenziale (meaning “essential”), featuring creative dishes with a minimalist flair. Expect lots of plays with dehydrated foods: dried tomato for umami flavor bombs and raspberries to provide tangy contrast to savory/fat-rich dishes. The menu (fried artichokes, organ meat delicacies, spaghetti, and lasagna) is designed to remind you of Italy's classic comfort foods — but provides an experience to engage all senses with visual and temperature plays, textures, flavor profiles, and ingredient deconstruction. Quality-to-value ratio is exceptional, as are the wine selections.

While not a restaurant by any stretch, new cocktail bar Mad Souls & Spirits is just as hot and noteworthy: After all, you'll need something to swash down all this food, right? This lounge is the one of the first casual bars in Florence doing craft cocktails for less than a tenner. The bar is manned by cocktail competing (and winning) barmen, one of whom is a journalist for local industry magazine Bargiornale. If you're a mezcal enthusiast, you've found your mecca, as the barmen have a penchant for collecting small-batch mezcals. There are fun snacks here, like triangle sandwich tramezzini with untraditional fillings, such as peanut butter and peated whiskey jelly, and curry chicken salad.

An enterprise by the wildly ambitious Francesco Sanapo, Ditta has wowed Florence with its craft, specialty coffee. Ditta started with one location in 2013, offering bistro-style brunch items like pancakes and croque madames along with their quality brew menu. In a matter of just a few years, Ditta has expanded to three stores, becoming a sort of empire, and the second location is a feat with a quaffable barstock and a dining area serving dishes by chef and sommelier Arturo Dori. Here you can enjoy tapas like spicy salami paste toasts cooled with burrata, polenta squares with whipped baccalau, beef steak tartare with salty accoutrements (capers, anchovies, mustard), and thick pici spaghetti topped in a gin-spiked ragu, since the owner has a soft spot for craft gin. Don't forget dessert, especially the tiramisu — they use their bold espresso to soak the ladyfingers.

Another hit for modern-style restaurants in Florence, Arà è Sud could be considered “New Italian” for Sicilian grub. The interior is quaint and colorful, fit for nicer occasions but not too fancy. The man in charge of the food is Carmelo Pannocchietti, who first graced Florence with Sicilian flavors at his street-food outpost, Arà, which served real-deal cannoli and other traditional desserts. At Arà è Sud, find refined versions of Sicilian classics like pasta con le sarde (sardines), eggplant-based dishes like pasta alla norma and caponata, stuffed swordfish rolls, and a few thoughtful seafood-based couscous and pastas. Again, there’s an emphasis on sourcing incredible raw materials: native varieties of grain, sheep ricotta, prized almonds and pistachios, and extra virgin olive oil from Sicily.

Florence is starting to get a taste for Asian food. While there are some dumplings around town (a far cry from New York's dumpling scene), Florence is putting its stakes instead in decent Japanese ramen, freshly made in-house. Koto Ramen is led by a team of ramen enthusiasts careful to respectfully procure tasty bowls of the iconic Japanese noodle soup. At lunch, pickings are slim and limited to three varieties of ramen, but at night, the menu opens up to a few more, including tantan flavored with hot chili and sesame paste, and appetizers to match like edamame, gyoza, and tempura. Ramen is first come, first serve until they run out.

Naples-born Giovanni Santarpia — who for years drew a pizza-loving crowd to the middle of nowhere at Palazzo Pretorio in the Chianti hills south of Florence — now finally has his own outpost in the historical center. Here you’ll find real-deal traditional Neapolitan pizza: smokey, tangy savory dough with bubbles of charred crust topped with prime ingredients (like Campania-sourced buffalo milk mozzarella). The focus is on high quality raw ingredients and technique, down to the double-fermented dough, and pies with creative twists like squash and pancetta. Santarpia is quite possibly the only Neapolitan pizzeria in town worth frequenting, if you can land a table.

Even if Vivo’s interior has some serious quirks and feels more like a gymnasium cafeteria, the seafood here is worth it all. Vivo is one of the few new seafood joints sourcing fish the right way — sustainably and directly from a cooperative of fishermen in the Maremma south of coastal Tuscany. The strong points here are anything they do raw, as the quality of fish is superb. Pastas are decent, the wine list thoughtfully decided, and mains like sesame seed–seared tuna are gourmet in style.