Hoseki: a Japanese dinner for when you cannot face more Tuscan food

Every guide on this site tells you to eat Tuscan, and we stand by all of them. This review is for the evening those guides do not serve: day four, when you have had the ribollita, the bistecca and the lampredotto, and the thought of another plate of any of them defeats you. Tourists suspect that moment is a personal failing. We live here, so we can tell you it is not: even residents get tired of Tuscan food, and when we do, this is the kind of place we go. On Sunday 30 August, at ten past eight, the three of us sat down at Hoseki, the Japanese restaurant near Porta al Prato. The usual promise: we paid our own way, €92.50 in full, and nobody at the restaurant knew this was a review. The dinner and the verdict are ours; AI only helped with the writing.

One more thing to own before the food, because hiding it would flatter us and mislead you: we are newcomers to Japanese cooking. We came to it only recently, on a trip to Greece of all places, and this was our first Japanese meal in Florence. What follows is an enthusiast's account, not a connoisseur's. Read it as exactly that.

The place

Hoseki sits on Via il Prato at the Porta al Prato end of Santa Maria Novella, a few minutes from the station, and has been run by Silvia Ye since 2009 (Registro Imprese). The room is not big, and it is bathed in a deep red light that our camera lost the fight with all evening, but the effect in person is the opposite of cramped: calm, quiet, unhurried, a feeling of space and ease that has nothing to do with square metres. It is closed Mondays, with lunch and dinner service Tuesday to Sunday; book by phone on +39 055 282012, because the smallness that makes the calm is also the reason to reserve.

What we ate

The receipt, as observed on 30 August 2026, three guests:

€30.83 a head for three courses each and water. Not a cheap dinner; fair for what arrived.

The plates my wife will go back for are the Tempura Maki and the Sakedon, the salmon rice bowl. Her verdict, delivered at the table: wonderful, said three times. Mine: I agree, said four. We could dress that up in food-writing adjectives, but the count is more honest than anything we would compose afterwards.

The dish the review sends you to, though, is the Pinut Tori Yaki Soba, which is how the till spells its peanut chicken yaki soba. It simply enchanted me. I was working out how to get it delivered to the house before the plate was empty, and the answer to that question gets its own section below, because it turned out to be genuinely useful.

The service, which taught us

Here is the thing we rated highest, and it cost nothing. We were obviously new to this food, and the waitress explained the dishes to us: what each was, how it was eaten, what went with what. No performance, no impatience, just teaching. Service that meets you where you are is rarer than tableside theatre and worth far more, and it is half the reason the evening felt so easy.

The desserts, and the battle

The Tropical Cheesecake melts in the mouth, and I can report this with precision because three spoons fought over one slice: mine, my wife's, and my son's. What I salvaged from that skirmish was enough to fix a resolution in my mind, which is that next time I am ordering one and defending it. The Mochi Misto was good and tasty, and on another night it would have starred; against the cheesecake it finished second in a two-horse race I intend to re-run with better tactics.

What is not perfect

Our rule is that a review without a downside is an advert, so here is the honest ledger. The red lighting that makes the room so atmospheric is merciless on everything else: you cannot photograph your food, and reading the menu takes a tilt toward the nearest lamp. The room is small, so a weekend walk-in is a gamble; book. And €30.83 a head without a drop of alcohol is a real dinner bill, even if we think it is priced fairly for the quality. Beyond those three, nothing bothered us, and as we said in our first review, we would rather tell you that plainly than manufacture a complaint.

Ordering it at home

This is the practical detail we went looking for afterwards, because of the yaki soba. Hoseki runs its own delivery and takeaway, not the big apps. When we checked, the restaurant was not orderable on Deliveroo or Glovo, whatever stale directory listings still claim; orders go through its own online portal at hoseki-firenze.ipratico.com, with a €50 minimum for delivery and a 4pm order cutoff for addresses outside the Florence comune (Hoseki). The apps the restaurant once advertised have gone quiet, so the web portal is the channel that works. A €50 minimum sounds steep for one person and entirely reasonable for a family that has discovered a shared cheesecake problem.

Who this is for

Anyone in Florence who has hit the Tuscan wall: the visitor on day four, the resident on year four. Also anyone staying near the station who wants a calm, genuinely good dinner ten minutes from their hotel, and any family whose members can be trusted with their own desserts, which ours cannot. We think Hoseki deserves more attention than it gets, and we say that as people who paid full price and will pay it again, next time with two cheesecakes.

When you are ready to return to the Tuscan table, where to eat in Florence is the anchor, and the rest of our reviews live with our Florence guides.