Uffizi Gallery to Open Restaurant and Pastry Shop in Restored 19th-Century Spaces

The Uffizi Gallery in Florence will open its first in-house restaurant and pastry shop, housed in newly restored 19th-century rooms that once served as the Royal Post Office and earlier the Medici Mint, located behind the Loggia dei Lanzi. The project was announced jointly by director Eike Schmidt and Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano. The restaurant and pastry shop will focus on Italian cuisine with an emphasis on Tuscan tradition, alongside menus dedicated to other regional gastronomic cultures. A public tender will be published in the coming weeks to select the operator. The new spaces will function as a "pause space in the museum," according to Schmidt, and will also host rotating exhibitions of works from the museum's storage. The pastry shop will have a dedicated room. This initiative expands Florence's museum dining scene, which already includes Cafè 900 at Museo Novecento, La Leggenda dei Frati at Villa Bardini, and Gucci Osteria at the Gucci Museum. In Tuscany, one of the earliest successful museum-restaurant collaborations is at Centro Pecci in Prato, with chef Angiolo Barni of Myo. The Uffizi also hopes for progress on the long-stalled Isozaki Loggia project, which has been in development since 1998 and recently gained support from Florence's architects.