Where to find a great steak in Italy

My favorite kind of restaurants in Italy tend to be the ones where a well-loved relative might be taken to celebrate his 83rd birthday. The food is traditional, the service kind, the prices not so high. The wine is probably from the next town over. And Uncle Beppe, over at that long table with his family, is having such a good time.

Il Cipresso, a sprawling osteria in the old mill town Loro Ciuffenna, has been on my to-try list for more than a decade. It’s not in the beautiful part of the village — it kind of resembles a repurposed childcare center tucked into the basement of an apartment block at the town’s base. I’m not in this area north of Arezzo as often as I would perhaps like to be, and the mezze maniche at Il Canto del Maggio a few hillsides over, oversized tubes in a super-pungent sauce of white wine and pancetta, is one of my favorite pasta dishes in the universe.

But Il Cipresso is locally famous for its roasts: feasts of beef, chicken, pork and pork liver cooked on a big rotisserie and served in great profusion on Sunday afternoons and New Year’s Day. A friend mentioned that the place had been recommended by Dario Cecchini, the celebrity butcher whose shop in Panzano was the basis of the Bill Buford book “Heat.” Cecchini approves of the meats.

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As it turns out, the restaurant doesn’t do its Sunday roasts in midsummer because nobody wants to work a rotisserie in 95-degree heat. But look over there — it’s Uncle Beppe. Hi, Uncle Beppe! Hope you like your cake!

When the antipasti begin to drift onto the table, it becomes obvious why Cecchini likes the place: It is almost as if he designed the menu. The creamy whipped lardo on the crostini is identical to (and may actually be) the kind he sells in his Panzano shop, the pecorino is smeared with what tastes like his red pepper jelly and the salt on the table is his bay-leaf-laced Profumo di Chianti, served straight out of the jar.

The charcuterie isn’t his, but it might as well be, especially the glossy, extra-aged prosciutto and thin slices of a pungent, extra-soft fennel salami that turns the funkiness up to 10. There is tonno di Chianti, a kind of Tuscan pork confit, long-simmered in olive oil until it begins to resemble good canned tuna, of which Cecchini is especially fond.

And after merely mind-blowingly good fresh pasta with truffles, porchetta with wild fennel blossoms and packets of roast rabbit wrapped in lardo, out comes the fiorentina — a massive bone-on steak, thick as an Elena Ferrante novel, with a complex bloody tartness at its heart that is closer to the taste of a beautifully aged Brunello than it is to something you might have had for dinner last week at Ruth’s Chris.

It is definitely one of Cecchini’s steaks. And a reminder that while you’re in Tuscany, you may as well eat beef. It’s worked pretty well for Uncle Beppe.

Via Alcide De Gasperi, 28, Loro Ciuffenna, 055 917 1127.