The Trio That Made Single-Item Restaurants a Thing—And Sent the Idea Nationwide

By Eric Barton | Sept. 26, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

The idea sounds like the kind of thing a consultant would kill before the first deck gets printed: open a restaurant, but instead of handing customers a menu, just give them one option. One dish, no alternatives, take it or leave it. In a town where diners expect excess—pages of sushi rolls, steakhouses with more cuts than a butcher can name—the one-dish concept seems doomed to fail. Except, of course, when it doesn’t.

That’s the gamble Andrea Fraquelli, Mattia Cicognani, and Ignacio Lopez Mancisidor took when they launched 84 Magic Hospitality. In less than a year, the three friends—two Italians and a Spaniard with a detour through Mexico—opened Cotoletta, San Lorenzo, and 3190. Each went viral in the first days they opened. And each doubled down on the same idea: stop offering too much, and just do one thing really, really well.

Since then, the one-dish model has started popping up far beyond Miami, like in Washington, D.C., where Medium Rare is a steak-frites-only restaurant. It’s among these new single-item restaurants with an the ethos Fraquelli, Cicognani, and Lopez pioneered in Miami. Which is why I reached out to them, to figure out how three friends with a contrarian idea managed to bend Miami dining and, maybe, change the playbook everywhere else.

From left: Ignacio, Mattia, and Andrea

Last night I went to one of their concepts, San Lorenzo. The vibe was a mix of fun—a loud, eclectic soundtrack—and formality, with mostly Italian waiters moving briskly and carrying themselves with old-world seriousness. With no menu, the head waiter asked us to choose between meat, fresh catch, lobster linguine, or a special rack of lamb. We chose the pasta, and the meal began with a procession of small plates: tomato bruschetta with stracciatella, beet carpaccio with goat cheese cream and hazelnuts, and others that could have been their own dinner. Then came the main event, a massive platter of lobster and shrimp in a garlicky sauce that left us asking if it was the best lobster pasta of our lives. Cracking shells, pulling meat from claws, and passing pieces across the table turned the whole thing into a kind of affair, communal eating that leaves you talking about it long after.

That experience makes more sense once you understand where these ideas come from, and how each of the three friends brings a different piece of themselves to the table.

Fraquelli grew up “basically born in a restaurant,” as he puts it, trailing his grandfather and father through dining rooms in Europe. He later worked at Café de la Paix in Paris and London’s Wolseley, watching owner Jeremy King glide through the room, remembering names, touching tables, never overstaying. “The lessons I learnt in those two places in particular have never left me,” Fraquelli says. For him, restaurants weren’t just places to eat. They were “hubs for human interaction,” powered by owners who weren’t afraid to be present.

Bruschetta with stracciatella

If Fraquelli brings the sense of a seasoned operator, Cicognani supplies the heart. He came from Emilia Romagna, land of ragù and Parmigiano. His grandmother’s Sunday sauce is the sense memory he still carries into every service. For him, hospitality is not technical but emotional. “Hospitality means seeking and sharing emotions,” he says. “It is not a set of rules or technical gestures, but the ability to make others feel welcomed, protected, and valued.” Which helps explain why, when Fraquelli pitched the idea of building a restaurant around a single dish, Cicognani thought it sounded both reckless and irresistible.

Vitello tonnato

Beet carpaccio

And then there’s Lopez, the one who tends to move fast and push ideas into action. Born in Mexico to Spanish parents, he grew up watching his father, dressed impeccably in a suit, eating Milanese with fries several times a week. It wasn’t just food; it was ritual. Years later, when Lopez got word of a space opening fast in Coconut Grove, he called Fraquelli and said they had to move now. “The next day in our usual run he told me, I have a bold idea: Why don’t we do a one dish restaurant that serves the best veal Milanese in the world?” Lopez remembers. “I said, ‘It’s crazy and risky but I love it.’ The rest is history.”

Bacalao

That restaurant became Cotoletta, the first of their Miami hits. The dish is an ode to Milan, a veal chop fried crisp, served with a lemon wedge, and exactly nothing else. You order it because that’s the only thing there is to order. The gamble worked. Customers weren’t turned off by the lack of choice; they found comfort in it.

“People liked to eat the same thing regardless of the choices,” Fraquelli says of his decades watching dining rooms. “Comfort and familiarity are one and the same.” He’s blunt about what the trio is trying to correct: “Restaurants have lost their imagination. They are all starting to look and feel the same. I have heard us be described as a breath of fresh air.”

Part of that air comes before the first bite. None of the 84 Magic Hospitality restaurants are easy to find. Cotoletta has a quiet entrance, San Lorenzo hides behind another set of doors, 3190 looks almost like nothing from the street. For Cicognani, the mystery is the point. “The entrance is the first gesture of a restaurant,” he says. “Surprise—having to search and discover—creates anticipation that awakens both the senses and the spirit. It’s like opening a book: the cover already invites you to step into a story.”

And once you step inside, you get the same thing each time: one dish, perfected. At San Lorenzo, it’s a lobster pasta, cooked with a sauce so rich it coats every strand of spaghetti. At 3190, a steak with fries, nothing more, nothing less. The repetition is the appeal. It’s a sharp contrast to a city where restaurants reinvent themselves daily to catch the next wave.

Seafood linguine

Whether they meant to or not, the three friends may have started a movement. Already, similar single-dish concepts are popping up in other cities. Cicognani won’t take credit but admits, “We were certainly among the first to believe that such a radical idea could actually work.” Lopez is more direct: “We’re the new kids on the block, but in many ways, we’re bringing back the old values that restaurants have lost: places where value truly matters and the customer experience has to be complete, 360 degrees.”

Tiramisu

The partners with Cotoletta chef Giulio Rossi

As for what’s next, Lopez hints, “Something is coming soon. Be prepared. We are hungry and just starting.”

Fraquelli, never one to temper his confidence, suspects this isn’t a gimmick but the future: “I suspect you’re seeing the future of restaurants, and we shall be betting on it too.”