Numero 11

Numero 11 occupies the ground floor of a Renaissance palazzo directly on the Lungarno Galileo Galilei — the southern bank of the Arno, looking across the river at the Old Town. The dining room is a contemporary modernist redesign of the original Renaissance space — pale travertine floors, white-painted walls, low pendant lighting, original 16th-century painted ceilings — and is widely regarded as the most architecturally sophisticated dining room in central Pisa. The terrace, in summer, looks directly across the Arno to the Lungarno Mediceo and the Old Town spires.

The cooking is contemporary Tuscan with a polished hotel-restaurant register. Beef tartare from Maremmana cattle with capers and aged Pecorino; tagliolini with white-truffle butter and aged Parmigiano (in autumn season); pike-perch from the Serchio with brown butter and parsley root; aged duck breast with Bolgheri red-wine reduction and fig; a tiramisù the kitchen has been refining for fifteen years. The five-course tasting menu rotates with the Tuscan growing year and is the most appropriate full dinner.

The wine list runs to about four hundred selections — a serious Bolgheri programme led by Sassicaia and Ornellaia, a Chianti Classico vertical, a Champagne row, and a small but well-chosen French section. The by-the-glass programme is rotated weekly and is unusually deep for a restaurant of this size. Service is fluent in English, French and German, and runs at a Florence-trained register.

Numero 11 is, alongside Osteria dei Cavalieri, one of two rooms that international business visitors to Pisa will be brought to by their hosts. It is the most architecturally striking; it is the most photographable; and it is, on a non-festival weeknight, surprisingly easy to book on a few days' notice. The terrace overlooking the Arno is among the most-watched outdoor business tables in central Pisa.

Numero 11 is the deal-closing dinner in Pisa. The Renaissance palazzo's painted ceilings provide unspoken institutional weight; the Lungarno terrace handles a Champagne entrance with grace; the wine list answers any serious order without theatre; and the modernist redesign signals taste rather than ostentation. For a small business dinner where the room itself is meant to be part of the brief, this is the most appropriate booking on the south bank of the Arno.