A quick trip down to Southwest Florida turned into one of the best food weekends I've had in a while — here's everything worth your time.
I went to Naples for a weekend with low expectations and came back wanting to move there. That’s an exaggeration, but only slightly. The food scene in Southwest Florida doesn’t get the attention it deserves — here’s what I found.
Mercato is an outdoor shopping and dining complex that, on paper, sounds like the kind of place I’d normally avoid. Outdoor mall, chains mixed with locals, valet parking. But the concentration of actually good restaurants makes it worth it, and the walkability means you can do drinks at one spot and dinner at another without moving your car.
The name is a little too cute but the fish is serious. This is the kind of seafood restaurant that sources locally when they can and doesn’t hide behind heavy sauces to cover for mediocre product.
The grilled snapper was the call — came with a charred corn succotash that was genuinely good on its own, not just filler. The stone crab claws are market price and worth whatever they cost. You’re in Naples; eat the stone crab.
Skipped dessert, walked over to Cavo for a drink, called it a night.
Walk the Fifth Avenue South corridor before 9am when it’s quiet. There’s a small bakery called Pane e Vino that opens at 7:30 that’s doing proper cornetti — flakier than anything I’ve found in Orlando — and espresso that would survive a side-by-side comparison with something from a serious specialty shop.
Not a tourist trap, not reviewed anywhere I could find. Just a small counter with six tables and a line that forms around 8am.
This is the meal of the trip. Old-world Italian, serious pasta program, dim lighting, the kind of room where conversations feel more important than they are.
Handmade pappardelle with wild boar ragù — this is a full stop dish. The pasta is right, the ragù is cooked until it barely needs a fork, the portion is generous without being aggressive. Ordered this and nothing else and had zero regrets.
The wine list is focused on Italian producers and they actually know what’s on it — the sommelier gave me a Barbera I wouldn’t have ordered on my own that turned out to be the best pairing of the night.
Book ahead. This one fills up.
Naples skews expensive — budget accordingly. But for a 48-hour food trip from Orlando, it’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive that punches well above its weight. The mix of serious local seafood, genuinely good Italian, and a few hidden gems makes it worth the trip at least once a year.
I’ll be back for the stone crab season.
More to discover
A tiny Vietnamese-Chinese fusion counter tucked into a Mills 50 strip mall that's turning out the most interesting bao and dan dan noodles in the city.
A Park Avenue institution that's been quietly setting the standard for specialty coffee in Central Florida for years — and the single-origins are genuinely worth the conversation.
