Tehran: the expensive dinner in Florence we think deserves your money

Here is the price and the verdict in one breath, because that is how I think of them. When you eat at Tehran, you feel you have spent a lot of money in one restaurant: €97.50 for three of us, €32.50 a head, for a shared platter, two rices, a salad and a bottle of water, with no wine and no dessert. Only our sunset dinner at La Gargotta has cost us more a head among the restaurants we have reviewed. And it is, I will say plainly, one of the best restaurants in Florence or Tuscany. This review says both things and flinches from neither. Know that this restaurant deserves your money.

The licence for saying so is time. We live here, and we have been eating at Tehran for more than a year: dinners, lunches, and takeaway nights when the containers come home and, when we finish, nothing is left. Literally nothing. This is the account of one documented dinner, on Friday 19 September 2026 at a quarter to eight, standing in for all the others. We paid our own way, €97.50, receipt in hand. One honest wrinkle on the usual formula: after a year of visits the staff know our faces, so "nobody knew us" would be untrue; what is true is that nobody knew this dinner was a review, because we have never told them we write one. The dinners and the verdict are ours; AI only helped with the writing.

A hundred metres from the Signoria

Tehran sits on Via dei Cerchi, about a hundred metres from Piazza della Signoria, in exactly the zone where every guide, including ours, tells you not to eat. The rule stands; this is the exception that explains it. The picture-menu trattorias around the square survive on people who will never return. A Persian restaurant in the same streets cannot: nobody wanders in for the view, so it has to earn the second visit, and the third, and our twentieth, and the ones after. Being not Italian is, we suspect, precisely why a restaurant this good survives where good Italian ones so often do not. It opened in 2017 and is independently run (The Florentine).

The room

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They say the eye eats before the mouth, and it is true here too. The dining room runs under a barrel vault in warm light, the walls carry framed photographs of Iran that say what the place is without a word of explanation, and a red neon sign in Persian script glows over it. It is small, and it is often full, because the people who eat here come back. Book.

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What we ate

The receipt, as observed on 19 September 2026, three covers, in the till's own spelling and then in the menu's own words (Ristorante Tehran):

The till prints "Totale per persona 32.50" at the bottom itself. The restaurant does the per-head arithmetic before you can, which tells you something about how clearly it understands what it costs.

The Sini Makhsus is the thing to share. Sini is a tray and makhsus is special, and on the menu it is four skewers on flatbread: kubide, the minced lamb and beef kebab; giuge, chicken marinated with saffron, lemon and onion; torsh, the pomegranate-marinated fillet; and cenge, fillet marinated with saffron and onion. The Celo is the plain saffron basmati that everything sits on, steamed with butter, and two portions were right for three people with the platter. The Salad Shirazi is diced cucumber, tomato and onion with mint, olive oil and lime: the cold, sharp counterweight the grill needs.

A word on the kebab, because it closes a loop. In our Lo Saj review I objected that in Italy "kebab" has come to mean shawarma, and that when I say kebab I mean the real thing, spiced meat grilled on a skewer. Tehran is the restaurant that proves my point. Lo Saj is the cheap lunch we go to every week; Tehran is the expensive dinner we save for, and the two should not be confused for a moment.

The Celo Torsh

If I name three things at Tehran, they are the kebab, the fillet, and, with an exclamation mark, the fillet marinated in pomegranate. That is the Celo Torsh, and torsh means sour. On the menu it is grilled beef fillet marinated in pomegranate concentrate, saffron, walnuts and red onion, served with a grilled tomato and saffron rice, €24. I will not claim to know Persian cooking; we are a family that lives here, found this plate, and kept ordering it. I am not a writer or a poet, but I am sure that many writers and poets would struggle to describe the taste. I tried, above.

Shahab

The warmest detail in every one of our reviews has turned out to be a person, and here it is Shahab: always doing his job, always welcoming you well. Feeling welcome and being treated seriously matters as much as the food, and after a year I can say the welcome has never once varied, whoever was at the next table.

What we are not going to say, and why

Our rule is that a review without a downside is an advert. My answer, and I mean it: no, I will not criticise the restaurant, honestly. So here is the honest handling. We have no complaint about the food, and that is unusual for us; in a year of visits I cannot recall one where it was less good than the one before. We would rather say that plainly than manufacture a flaw. What we owe you instead are three true things that are not complaints.

First, the price. €97.50 for three with one shared platter and nothing to drink but water. For comparison, our Hoseki dinner was €30.83 a head for three courses each. Tehran is €32.50 a head for a platter, rice, salad and water. That is the fact; my verdict stands beside it, and I will not soften it to "a little pricey," because you do feel you have spent a lot. Second, the room is small and the people who know it keep coming, so a weekend walk-in is a gamble. Third, the hours, which deserve their own paragraph, because getting them wrong would be our failure, not theirs.

The practical part

Tehran is closed on Tuesday. The restaurant's own website still shows an every-day timetable, but that page has not been touched since 2022; Google's live listing, which we checked on 11 October 2026, shows Tuesday closed and lunch and dinner the other six days, roughly 12:00 to 15:30 and 19:00 to 22:30 (Google Business). Call +39 055 094 5695 to book, which we would do for any evening and insist on for a weekend.

Takeaway, not delivery. Tehran does not deliver through Glovo, Deliveroo, JustEat or any of the apps, whatever old listings and the links on its own site suggested when we checked on 11 October 2026. Takeaway collected in person works, and it is how the containers that come home empty got there.

Who this is for

Anyone who has one dinner in Florence to spend properly and would rather spend it on the best meal we know than on the famous one. Anyone, too, who has read the warnings about eating near the Signoria and wants the exception that proves them. It is not the cheap night; Lo Saj is that. It is the one you save for, and after a year of saving for it, we have not found a reason to stop. The rest of our reviews live with our Florence guides.