The Cibreo Restaurant: Home to Florentine Steaks
The late Fabio Picchi established Cibreo Restaurant in 1979, a stone’s throw from the Sant’Ambrogio market in Florence. Fabio was known as the culinary soul of Florence; part poet, part performer, part culinary sorcerer, Fabio distilled simple, ancient Florentine recipes from the servants who survived off scraps from the nobleman’s table into world-famous culinary masterpieces.
Today, Fabio’s son, Gulio, continues the tradition by blending his optimistic entrepreneurial vision and artistic skills into new, irrepressibly Florentine culinary ventures. Gulio reminisces about his father’s passion for the neighborhood and why he established Cibreo in a lesser-known corner of Firenze in 1979.
“Father wanted to be as close to the source of the ingredients he used as humanly possible,” Gulio explains, “So he picked this location less than 30 paces from the center of the Sant’Ambrogio market. Sant’Ambrogio is not the biggest market in the city, but it’s where locals shop. The freshest meat and produce in all of Tuscany are found here.”
Italian Markets Today
As you walk through Sant’Ambrogio, you quickly understand Fabio’s passion for the place and the Italian’s passion for markets in general. Marketplaces not only create a daily touchpoint with friends and the community, but they also align Italian cooking with the seasons. Italians only eat and cook in season, with ingredients available at the market that day. Cibreo, like its peasant namesake, only uses the elements available at that very moment. Or, if an ingredient isn’t up to their standards, they change the menu. So it’s never the same twice.
We walk the aisles of Sant’Ambrogio at sunrise with Gulio and his new Executive Chef, Oscar Severini. It’s a symphony of color and texture: shouted conversations across stalls, laughter, hands picking through produce, smiles, and sounds of friendly banter float above a rainbow of fresh produce, heaping baskets of colorful fruit, prehistorically large fungi, and a freshly roasted suckling pig.
“Tuscan food has always been simple,” Chef Severini explains, “Florentines have transformed Tuscany’s raw bounty for eons but we have peasants to thank for the recipes that define the restaurant.”
He explains that “cibreo” comes from an ancient dish of chicken innards made by peasants pulled from the medieval trash heaps of the Florentine elite. This cuisine of necessity evolved into a cooking philosophy that survives today. Gulio Picci and Chef Severini, both in their late 30s’, represent the next generation of architects of Florentine Cuisine.
We are fortunate to witness this farm-to-table transformation in its purest form as we follow the Chef on his morning rounds through Sant’Ambrogio’s meandering market stalls. Severini doesn’t just examine vegetables he wants to cook; he is encouraged by the sellers to taste them first. Ultimately, he selects a handful of bright purple cardoons (a form of wild artichoke), and we move inside to visit his favorite butcher.
“We are in search of the best Florentine steak,” he smiles.
Florentine Steaks
Fiorentina is an adult Tuscan beef steak cut 3-4 fingers high and cooked rare on the grill. The first official mention of the steak Florentine is from the Accademia della Crusca in 1750, but you can visit a painting in the Uffizi from 1624 by Jacopo Chimenti known as Dispensa that depicts a rib-eye steak with almost photographic naturalism.
Florentine steaks are typically aged, and today’s selection is no exception. Beaming with pride, the butcher retrieves a rack of loin from the back. He deftly cleaves a slice off the end, explaining that this steak has aged over 70 days. Next, he removes the bone and twirls the meat with a flourish, displaying both sides for Chef Severini, who obediently presses four fingers against the slab to confirm its thickness.
Bags and arms bursting with today’s bounty, our walk back to Cibreo takes less than a minute. We arrive in the kitchen to a flurry of activity. The wood-burning oven crackles red-hot, assistants scurry to grab our ingredients, and the Chef begins his preparation. The Florentine is made with only a few ingredients; butter, salt, pepper, and a squeeze of fresh lemon on a piping hot pan. The cardoons cook in mere seconds with a drizzle of olive oil and a touch of salt on the fire, and the freshly rolled pasta is ready just as the steak comes off the stove.
Our first bite of Florentine uncovers astonishing subtleties of flavor as if this were the first time I’d tasted meat. The cardoon is tender, tangy, and light, providing a perfect, earthy compliment to the al dente pasta. Everything on the plate represents the purest expression of simple, unadorned flavor. That is the unfussy beauty of the Cibreo kitchen. By stripping away complexity, the real taste of food is revealed.
Cibreo is Chef Fabio Picchi’s incandescent love letter to Mediterranean life, friends, family, and fresh ingredients. You can still feel him in the kitchen, laughing and telling stories. The unpretentiousness of his cooking is a story unto itself, one that demands only your willingness to reimagine the transformation of food on its own terms.
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