Chic Nonna di Vito Mollica

The Trattoria in Florence Today

The trattoria is one of Italian dining's most durable formats, and Florence has never stopped producing them. What has changed is the tier at which serious chefs engage with it. For decades, the city's culinary ambition expressed itself at the high end: Enoteca Pinchiorri at three Michelin stars, Santa Elisabetta at two, a cluster of one-star properties including Borgo San Jacopo and Il Palagio operating at €€€€ price points with modern plating conventions. The informal register was left largely to neighbourhood operators with no particular culinary identity. That gap has narrowed. Chic Nonna di Vito Mollica, on Via del Corso in the historic centre, represents a newer pattern: a kitchen with genuine pedigree investing deliberately in the trattoria format, where warmth and familiarity are the measure of success rather than technical ambition for its own sake.

Walking In from Via del Corso

Via del Corso runs through one of Florence's most-trafficked zones, a street where international visitors and locals intersect daily. The address, at number 6 within the 50122 postcode, places the restaurant within easy walking distance of the Duomo, the Mercato Nuovo, and the dense accommodation cluster around the historic centre. The approach is as central as Florence gets, which means the room itself carries much of the responsibility for distinguishing the experience from the tourist corridor outside. Trattorie that work in this part of the city do so because they project a particular kind of ease: the sense that the kitchen is cooking what it wants, not what it calculates the street traffic will accept. That projection, when it lands, is harder to engineer than any tasting menu.

Vito Mollica and the Double Register

Chef Vito Mollica operates across two formats simultaneously in Florence, and the gap between them is instructive. Atto di Vito Mollica occupies the Italian Contemporary tier, where the kitchen's ambitions run toward refinement and precision. Chic Nonna sits at the opposite register, where the same culinary intelligence is applied to the grammar of the grandmother's kitchen: slow-cooked proteins, hand-rolled pasta, Tuscan produce weighted by season rather than spectacle. The double operation is not uncommon among Italian chefs who understand that the trattoria tradition demands its own discipline. Cutting corners in informality is as visible as cutting corners in fine dining, perhaps more so. For context on how other serious Italian kitchens position themselves across the country, Osteria Francescana in Modena, Le Calandre in Rubano, and Piazza Duomo in Alba each represent the formal end of Italian culinary ambition, while Chic Nonna deliberately occupies a different position in the conversation.

What Tuscan Trattoria Cooking Means Here

Tuscan cuisine at the trattoria level is not a simplified version of fine dining: it is a separate tradition with its own demands. The canon includes ribollita and pappa al pomodoro, bistecca alla Fiorentina from Chianina beef, pici with wild boar ragù, crostini di fegatini. These are dishes where the quality of the raw material and the patience of the process do the work. The Tuscan kitchen rewards producers who have been farming the same hillside for generations, and it is unforgiving when short cuts are taken with stock, with fat, or with time. A kitchen carrying Mollica's credentials is expected to source accordingly and to treat these preparations with the same seriousness applied to a more architecturally complex plate. For similar Tuscan kitchen sensibilities in the wider region, Alle Logge di Piazza in Siena and Campo Del Drago at Rosewood Castiglion del Bosco offer points of comparison in the broader range of Tuscan regional cooking.

Florence's Broader Table

Chic Nonna sits within a Florence dining scene that rewards research. The high-formal tier, anchored by Enoteca Pinchiorri, is surrounded by a cluster of modern Italian kitchens operating at the starred level. Below that, the informal register includes institutions such as Cibreo Caffe, which carries Florentine culinary history in its rooms, and operations further out such as Coquinarius Fiesole. Chic Nonna occupies the intersection where credentialed cooking meets the trattoria format, a tier that the city's most engaged visitors tend to prioritise once they move past the Michelin bracket. For broader coverage of eating and drinking in the city, our full Florence restaurants guide, bars guide, and wineries guide map the scene across tiers and neighbourhoods. The Florence hotels guide and experiences guide complete the picture for those planning time in the city.

Among Italian chefs working at scale across both formal and informal registers, reference points include Enrico Bartolini in Milan, Dal Pescatore in Runate, and Atelier Moessmer Norbert Niederkofler in Brunico, each of whom has shaped how Italian kitchens think about regional identity in the contemporary era.

Planning Your Visit

The restaurant is at Via del Corso, 6, Florence, placing it squarely in the pedestrian core of the historic centre. Visitors arriving from outside the city can reach the address easily from Santa Maria Novella station on foot in under twenty minutes, or by taxi from any of the major accommodation clusters in the centro storico.