We're always very excited to try a 100% vegetarian restaurant knowing we can eat anything we want…read moreon the menu and we were excited to learn that Il Vegetariano existed. It's a bit of a walk outside of the center of Florence but we'd thought we'd see what the Italian vegetarian focus experience was like. It was serviceable, but not as great as we'd hoped.
The concept is interesting...the menu changes every day depending on the whims of that days chef, so our experience could have been informed a bit by just what we experienced that day, and might have been completely different on another day.
An issue sometimes with all vegetarian restaurants is they specialize in the concept of being vegetarianism, without necessarily specializing in a particular kind of food which can lead to a mish-mash of disconnected offerings which is what we found on the menu here. The night we were there, for example you could get Italian, Indian, and strudel main dishes...all vegetarian, but otherwise not specializing in any particular type of food.
We also didn't have a reservation. They were nice enough to seat us, but the restaurant was not at all full in any of its rooms (at any point when we were there) and the person who seated us, made a point of telling us they prefer reservations and then seated us at probably the least desirable table in the restaurant, right next to the cash register and right across from the salads display case which was the most trafficked area of the restaurant with people ordering their food hovering right over our table. We definitely felt like we were being unnecessarily punished with this table, especially when there were plenty of other places we could have sat and the overall demeanor of the person who seated us made us feel like she felt like she was doing us a big favor and she had her limits. So kind of a bummer of an introduction to the place.
You order by writing down what you want on a slip of paper they provide you with, and then bringing that to the cashier to pay. That's fine, but it's not exactly "service" like you might get at any other sit down restaurant with servers and a wait staff.
The food came extremely quickly...at the same time as the wine...It's hard to complain about quick service, but at most other places we experience in Italy (and the rest of the world for that matter) you get your wine first and can enjoy it a bit before the food shows up. We felt rushed. Also, and I'm sure I'm coming off as awfully picky, but you can see the high scores I typically give in my other reviews so...but the chairs were really uncomfortable to sit on. I typically don't think about the chairs at restaurants...these chairs made me think about them.
My wife and I shared a lasagna and a greens-filled calzone-like pastry for our mains. Both of these portions were super-large...we appreciate generosity in portions, but these were just too large for us to be able to finish...both, especially the lasagna were really rich and heavy dishes too. They checked the box for being vegetarian but didn't excel to star dishes in terms of flavor or presentation that we'd want again.
The desserts looked amazing but by the time we had eaten as much as we could of the mains, we just didn't want anything else or to hang around.
We had many vegetarian-friendly meals at many restaurants in the cities we visited in Italy on this trip. This one was easily the most disappointing. If we lived in town we might come by to try the desserts or to see if it's a completely different experience with an unnecessary reservation and different chef...but otherwise, it wasn't really worth the walk out of the center of Florence to eat here.
