Four Seasons Firenze: Il Palagio Florence, tasting menus and terrace

Paolo Lavezzini comes from Emilia-Romagna and worked in European fine-dining restaurants before spending 10 years in Brazil. Four Seasons connects his cooking to those experiences as well as his work in Tuscany. At Il Palagio, that background appears in a menu rooted in local produce while making room for miso, yuzu, curry and other flavours. Choose it when you want a seasonal Italian meal with a chef’s particular route through the ingredients.

The Count’s Garden follows plants and places associated with the Gherardesca Garden. Its opening green celery takes miso bagna càuda and browned butter; a Milanese-style porcini course brings candied lemon and black garlic. The rice course adds Portobello mushrooms and yuzu to San Massimo Riserva rice. For a diner drawn to vegetables and the garden itself, this is the most direct way into the restaurant’s current menu.

That sequence continues with onion soup, Tuscan bread, marinated egg yolk and Antani De Magi cheese. Escarole takes olives, capers, rye bread and a Passolina-grape chutney; coconut-and-lime sorbet arrives with Mediterranean herbs. The ending brings fig sponge, sheep’s-milk yoghurt, lemon and burnt wheat. Discuss any dietary requirements with the team: a garden-themed menu can still contain milk, egg, gluten and other allergens identified beside the dishes.

The Queen’s Spices is a different sort of story, organised around spices and a playful restaurant-created legend about Catherine de’ Medici. The menu itself frames that history as imaginative. On the plate, the cumin course becomes Tuscan red curry with Tyrrhenian prawns, red pepper and kaffir lime. Saffron appears in a potato-filled pappardella with scorpion-fish guazzetto and tarragon. Choose this sequence for those combinations and flavours.

Star anise joins the dischi volanti pasta with creamed corn, Tuscan bardiccio sausage and fennel. The black-pepper course brings charcoal-grilled Angus short rib with celeriac, lime and peanut butter; later a pineapple skewer combines sweet pepper, courgette and a sweet-and-sour soy glaze. Coriander-seed panna cotta ends the sequence with lime, raspberry and semi-candied Taggiasca olives. It is a menu worth reading together, particularly when people at the table have different tastes.

The Gherardesca menu moves from the garden towards the sea and countryside. Amberjack comes with seasonal herbs, salicornia and oyster Hollandaise; a courgette flower is filled with buffalo ricotta. A Tuscan Coast risotto draws on cacciucco sauce, molluscs and crustaceans. The menu then brings agnolotti with burrata stracciatella and roasted Livornese cockerel cream, followed by Casentino lamb. Warm brioche with strawberry grapes and rosemary closes that route.

À la carte offers a way to assemble a different meal. The selection includes beef tartare with Tyrrhenian prawns and seaweed powder, monkfish pasta with Reggello chickpea cream and orange, and roasted turbot with porcini, green apple and fermented lemon. A roasted duck dish combines white miso, walnut, mizuna, Mugello potato and berries. Read the whole description when planning around an ingredient: several plates bring meat, seafood or nuts into the same preparation.

There is also a main course to share: line-caught sea bass Wellington with shrimp moqueca, sweet potato and okra. For a table that particularly wants a shared main, discuss how it fits into the rest of dinner before selecting individual starters and pasta. The restaurant’s menu gives you that option alongside its composed tasting sequences.

Desserts on the current menu include warm brioche with strawberry grapes and rosemary; crisp puff pastry with Venezuelan Criollo chocolate, apricot and lemongrass; and creamy milk rice with plum compote, helichrysum and passito di Pantelleria reduction. Those give a diner choosing à la carte a clear final decision. If wine is part of the evening, the restaurant offers its cellar selection alongside the tasting menus, allowing the food and drink to be planned together.

Il Palagio is the place for Lavezzini’s tasting menus. Choose the Atrium for an aperitivo, ask for the Chapel when privacy is central to the evening, or consider the hotel’s Sunday brunch for a daytime gathering.