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.
Angelo Kometa doesn’t so much run a restaurant as he runs the room. I watched him slide into a table of three women, charming them like a man who’s logged more hours at the maître d' stand than most of us have in offices. The man who had been sitting with the women returned, laughing, “OK, I know you’re better looking, but…” Kometa stood, hugged him, and instantly folded the guy into the act.
That’s the show at Da Angelino Cucina Italiana, the new Italian place in CocoWalk. On a Sunday night, it felt less like a restaurant opening and more like the weekly family gathering you didn’t know you belonged to.
Miami has so many Italian restaurants you could eat pasta every night for a year and still not repeat yourself. Some of them want to be temples to truffle shavings, with pastas priced like porterhouses. Others are slick nightclubs with spaghetti somewhere in the background. Da Angelino doesn’t play that game. It’s warm, almost disarmingly so. Families settle in with kids, grandparents easing into theirs. This is dinner as ritual, not theater.
It helps that Da Angelino comes with heavyweight backing. The restaurant is the first collaboration between Graspa Group, the folks behind Osteria and Salumeria 104, and Ariete Hospitality, led by Michelin-starred Michael Beltran. Graspa gets its long-awaited debut in Coconut Grove, while Ariete finally has an Italian concept to its name. The result doesn’t feel like some boardroom rollout, though. It feels like two crews of veterans giving Kometa the keys and trusting him to make the place feel like home.
We opened with the wagyu carpaccio, a dish I’ve eaten enough times to rarely remember. This one stuck. The beef came sliced into perfect petals, dotted with aioli, and jabbed with potato chips standing upright like strange little sculptures. A mustard-lemon dressing gave it bite. It felt like a dish made by someone still paying attention.
Wagyu carpaccio
For pasta, I picked the mezzi paccheri, toothy tubes catching every drop of shellfish bisque, a sauce so briny and concentrated it tasted like the tide rolling in. A grilled tiger prawn sprawled across the top, while scallops, mussels, clams, and octopus swam below. It was decadent in a way that made me drag bread through what was left. My wife’s cacio e pepe arrived in its own performance: spun hot from a cheese wheel, then buried under shaved white truffle. I imagine people three tables away caught the aroma and quietly decided that would be their order.
Mezzi paccheri
Tiger shrimp
Then came the Nigerian tiger shrimp, butterflied and grilled, the kind of seafood that makes you rethink the hierarchy. Softer than lobster, more flavorful, buttery to the point of excess. On the side is an onion salsa of sorts, dotted with capers and olives, flavorful but not overpowering. We fell for it hard.
Tiramisu
Dessert was tiramisu, assembled in front of us. That tiny flourish saved the ladyfingers from sogginess, leaving them crisp under the mascarpone. Simple, yes. Perfect, also yes.
Da Angelino is polished enough to sit alongside Miami’s glossy Italian scene, but it feels personal in a way the others don’t. It’s Kometa’s place, and you know it the second he shakes your hand, hugs your neighbor, or pulls up a chair like he’s been waiting for you. When we left, Kometa gripped my hand with both of his, as if welcoming me to the family. Whatever it was, he made me believe it. Behind us, families were still filing in, despite the late hour and the rain coming down outside. In Miami, Sunday dinners run late. Whatever chaos Miami had brewing outside, this room was its antidote.
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