Best Italian Restaurants in Miami 2026. Worth the Booking
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Our top Italian table in Miami is Boia De, the city's only Michelin-starred Italian-leaning kitchen. Behind it: Lucali, Macchialina, Carbone, and Scarpetta.
I have eaten Italian on four continents, and Miami's version is more serious than its spray-tan reputation suggests. The city's best rooms split cleanly by region: Brooklyn pizza on Bay Road, Venetian cicchetti at Soho Beach House, Mario Carbone's red-sauce theatre on Collins Avenue, and one Michelin-starred kitchen doing its own modern thing from a Buena Vista strip mall. These seven are the ones worth booking specifically for the cooking, not the scene.
7 Italian Restaurants in Miami Worth Booking
Boia De is the only Italian-leaning kitchen in Miami carrying a Michelin star, held since the guide reached the city in 2022, and Luciana Giangrandi and Alex Meyer run it from a 24-seat room in a Buena Vista strip mall at 5205 NE 2nd Avenue. The cooking is modern American on Italian bones: handmade pasta, a handwritten menu that changes constantly, a wine list that treats Italy as seriously as France. Eater named it Restaurant of the Year. Around $90 a head before wine, and book three to four weeks out, because the room is tiny and the whole city knows it.
Mark Iacono brought his Carroll Gardens pizzeria south to Sunset Harbour in 2013, and Lucali at 1930 Bay Road is still the most honest pie in Miami. There is barely a menu: a thin, blistered plain pie under buffalo mozzarella, shaved Parmigiano and torn basil, plus calzones and a short list of salads. No toppings arms race, no spectacle, deliberately low-tech booking. Around $40 a head. Skip it if you want a proper multi-course sit-down; this is one excellent pizza and a glass of red, and it has no interest in being anything more.
Michael Pirolo opened Macchialina at 820 Alton Road in 2012 and was a James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: South in 2016, and it remains South Beach's most convincing rustic trattoria. Everything in the pasta basket is made by hand, and that is the reason to come: the room is loud, warm and built for a long table of friends rather than a quiet two-top. Around $70 a head. This is the neighbourhood choice for the night Carbone feels like too much theatre.
Carbone is Mario Carbone and Major Food Group's love letter to mid-century Italian-American New York, transplanted to 49 Collins Avenue in South of Fifth and now wearing its own Michelin star. The spicy rigatoni vodka and the veal parmesan are the dishes people fly in for, delivered by captains in burgundy tuxedos in a Ken Fulk room built for spectacle. Around $150–$250 a head before wine. Worth it once for the performance; skip it if you want a quiet, ingredient-first dinner, because this is theatre and it knows it.
Scott Conant opened Scarpetta inside the Fontainebleau in 2008, and his spaghetti, thick strands in a sauce of nothing but tomato, basil, butter and a little Parmesan, is still the plate that defines refined Italian on Miami Beach. The creamy polenta with truffled mushrooms is the other order. The room is polished and hotel-formal, better for impressing a client than for intimacy. Around $120 a head. The cooking is more disciplined than a resort address usually promises.
Casa Tua has been Miami Beach's most discreet northern Italian room since Miky Grendene, a Padova native, opened it inside a Mediterranean-style villa at 1700 James Avenue in 2002. Dinner happens in a candlelit garden behind a hedge most people walk straight past, on a restrained menu of Veneto and Lombardy cooking: risotto, branzino, handmade pasta. Around $120–$160 a head. Come for an anniversary, not a group night out; it is one of the few rooms in the city that still feels genuinely private.
Cecconi's, in the courtyard of Soho Beach House at 4385 Collins Avenue, is the Venetian on this list, open to the public since the club arrived in 2010 and run by executive chef Sergio Sigala. Order the way Venice does: cicchetti to start, then the lobster spaghetti or a wood-fired pizza under the banyan trees. Around $80 a head. It is the most reliable all-day room here, breakfast through dinner, and the least likely to disappoint a mixed group.
How to Pick the Right Italian Restaurant for Your Evening
Carbone and Scarpetta are the rooms for a client dinner or a birthday with an audience. Casa Tua is the one for an anniversary you want kept private. Macchialina and Cecconi's hold up a long table of friends. Boia De rewards a couple who care more about the cooking than the scene, and Lucali is a pizza-and-red-wine night, nothing grander.
Boia De wants three to four weeks for its 24 seats, and Carbone is harder still at weekends. Scarpetta, Casa Tua and Cecconi's take a week or two. Macchialina is usually a few days out, and Lucali runs a tight, low-tech, same-day list, so call when you wake up.
Carbone's spicy rigatoni and veal parm, Scarpetta's tomato-and-basil spaghetti, Lucali's plain pie, Cecconi's lobster spaghetti and cicchetti. At Boia De and Macchialina, follow the handwritten pasta of the day; that is where each kitchen shows its hand.