AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed Miami restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
The dish that explains Le Specialità arrives in a simple white bowl. It is arugula, dressed in olive oil, a pinch of salt, and a few Parmesan shavings. It costs $14, and it can be recreated at home in under a minute, including the time it takes to find the olive oil. Whether you see this salad as underwhelming or the distilled essence of Mediterranean eating will tell you pretty quickly whether this place is for you.
That’s because the arugula is the mission statement of Le Specialità, a Milanese institution from 1977 that recently dropped into the Miami Design District, its first U.S. outpost. Reimagined by Spicy Hospitality Group, the restaurant pitches the Milan ideal that simplicity plus good ingredients equals excellence: house-made pastas, honest seafood, and pizzas that built a reputation back in Italy. It’s all delivered in a “radical retro chic” dining room filled with serious art and seriously styled people. The food is restrained. The energy is absolutely not.
The arugula salad
Walk in and the first thing you see is the bar on the left, a long stretch of counter lined with big, sink-into-them leather chairs that feel like a spot to post up for the night. A few tables and booths hug the room—this isn’t the cavernous dining rooms so often built in Miami these days. In the back there is a second bar facing the pizza oven, flames flickering behind the pizzaiolos. A wall of mismatched pictures and paintings gives it that curated-but-casual trattoria vibe. Even early on a Sunday, it was loud and lively, full of people in outfits that looked like they spent the day at Design District boutiques.
The simplicity starts right away. The Caesar salad is essentially finely chopped romaine with a light, lemony dressing and shaved Parm on top. The menu promises thyme breadcrumbs, but we were hunting for them like they were an escape room clue. It is crisp and pleasant, but it feels like the kind of Caesar you throw together at home when you have a flight to catch and half a head of lettuce left in the fridge.
Caesar salad.
The Margherita pizza is my usual litmus test, and here it turned into a full table debate. The crust is almost cracker-like, so crisp that any attempt to fold a slice will leave you with a small landslide of pizza shards on your plate. The sauce is sweet, the cheese is excellent, and if you like your pies light and snappy, like the ones at Lucali, you will be very happy.
Margherita pizza.
Tonnarelli alla Norma
We ordered the Tonnarelli alla Norma next, which is less about the eggplant than about the pasta itself. The tonnarelli is beautifully cooked, the ricotta generous and creamy, and the eggplant shows up mostly as a few fried chips on top. If your idea of alla Norma is a tangle of tomato and eggplant, this will feel a little minimalist. If you are here for the chew of fresh pasta and clean flavors, it lands right where it is aiming.
Dover sole
Finally, we had the Dover sole, filleted and smothered in a beurre blanc with capers. Like everything else, it is straightforward: flaky fish with the saline pop of the capers, a rich beurre blanc below. The aforementioned arugula joined it on the table, another reminder that this kitchen is not interested in flourishes beyond the basics done correctly. We skipped dessert, which somehow felt appropriate; it was the Mediterranean version of pushing back from the table and pretending you are the kind of person who does not always say yes to tiramisu.
Le Specialità is building a particular kind of night: simple, carefully executed food in a space where you raise your voice a little and nobody minds because they are doing the same. If you want layers of flavor and big, cheffy gestures for your money, that $14 arugula is going to haunt you. But if your idea of a good time is a crisp pizza, a perfectly cooked fish, and a room humming with people who dressed for it, this Milan transplant will make perfect sense.
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