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.
There’s a restaurant review website in Miami that’s owned by a big corporate bank and, for some reason, loves to hate on any restaurant that doubles as a club. A well-respected PR person in town once summed it up to me: "If it's a guy selling pizza from a tricycle in a Hialeah parking lot, they'll love it. But God forbid there's a disco ball."
But the truth is that the restaurant-nightclub combo can be more fun, more entertaining, more of a night out, than your average pizza-making-tricycle operation. And that’s even more true if the food is good, as it generally is at La Ferneteria in Wynwood.
The place started in Buenos Aires, cloned itself in Paraguay, and now occupies a rooftop nine floors up in Wynwood. The menu pulls from both northern and southern Italy, in an open-air space that understands a night out should have some entertainment value. On weekends, our server told me, they clear a bunch of tables for dancing, the room fills up, and by Saturday a fire dancer starts twirling blazing batons. Which shows they understand Miami.
You get there down an alley, although one that has been put in a blazer for the evening thanks to a red carpet, a woman checking reservations, and then an elevator ride up into an open-air room that is both handsome and road-weary. Old tile floors look marked up from a thousand dropped hunks of gum, armchairs are worn where arms should go, and there’s a disheveled trash area that’s in view when you first walk in. But then it also has the charm of a Mediterranean garden, with the big planters of palms separating booths that run along the edges and a nice breeze passing through the space. We arrived just before the sun eased its way down through the plants, the faux aged walls looking less like a set piece as the main lighting becomes table lamps.
La Ferneteria could’ve rested on those sunset views and the breezes, but the kitchen, it seems, is putting out the kind of solid Italian cooking that usually shows up in a neighborhood trattoria. A burrata caprese arrived with basil pesto, a good aged balsamic, and enough toasted almond slices to keep the whole thing from sliding into autopilot. The caprese is the typical arrangement, a reminder that maybe all shaved beef needs is well dressed arugula and good Parm.
My wife ordered the 10-layer short rib lasagna, which comes as a wedge splayed across the plate like a birthday cake. Ours spent too much time under the broiler, leaving a few edges darker than they needed to be, but the thing still delivered, rich and comforting and built on the very old principle that lasagna works because layers of meat, pasta, and cheese.
I ordered the lobster tagliolini, which came in a tomato bisque with half a tail perched on top and plenty of bay shrimp tucked into the pasta. It was luxurious without heading into too much so, a difficult balance for most versions of that dish.
Dessert was tiramisu, brought over in a mold that the runner removed at the table so a Fernet cream sauce could ease down the sides. It’s theatrical, yes, but also very good, and this is a restaurant smart enough to know those two things can coexist.
I finished with a shot of Fernet, despite both the server and bartender warning me most people can’t get it down. For me, it’s a thing I keep trying, convinced, like it was for negronis, that someday I’ll get it. It is herbal and medicinal, but it also feels, after a meal like this, exactly right.
That might be the best way to think about La Ferneteria too. Not everybody is going to go for a restaurant where dinner might turn into dancing. But Miami these days has a weakness for places that know how to feed you and entertain you, and frankly, that sounds like a nice night out.
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