AUTHOR BIO: Brandon Chase is a Miami personal injury attorney who has a deep knowledge of wine and food, built by marrying into an Italian family. Email him here.
Ezio’s had my attention before dinner started. The new Italian steakhouse in North Beach is from the co-founders and chefs behind Roberta’s Pizza, Foul Witch, and Blanca, and that kind of background tends to come with expectations. The good news is that Ezio’s meets them with strong pastas, serious steaks, and a room that understands exactly what kind of night it wants to be.
Inside, Ezio’s leans hard into an Italian sensibility, though not in a theme-park way. A large Venetian-style chandelier hangs over the room, while wall sconces throw a low, flattering light across the dining room. It’s a handsome space, one that feels considered without trying too hard to announce itself.
Cantabrian anchovies
The meal opened with house-made focaccia served alongside stracciatella, cultured butter, and Cantabrian anchovies. Great bread, butter, and anchovies remain one of the simplest and most convincing arguments for going out to dinner, and Ezio’s makes that case well. The focaccia had the right light pull to it, and everything around it seemed chosen to let those first bites do their work.
Then came lamb and beef meatballs in a baking dish with pomodoro sugo and more stracciatella. The meatballs were tender and rich, and the sugo did what a good one should do, which is make the whole thing feel a little like Sunday. It was straightforward comfort food, handled with enough care to keep it from feeling ordinary.
Meatballs in pomodoro sugo
The pasta course had more hits than misses. Garganelli with local Everglades tomatoes brought brightness and acid, the kind of plate that reminds everyone at the table that tomatoes can still be the focus. The honey nut squash cappelletti, dressed in buffalo milk butter and finished with Piave Vecchio, was even better, with a softness and quiet sweetness that never tipped into excess. The one dish that lagged behind the others was the pasta and clams. The spaghetti itself was properly al dente, and the kitchen clearly knows what it’s doing with texture, but the sauce needed more acidity and salt. Without that extra push, it missed some of the briny life that makes spaghetti alle vongole such a great dish. It felt muted in a meal that otherwise had more confidence.
Garganelli
Squash cappelletti
The steaks, though, were the center of the night. Our waiter, Carlo, who’s from Siracusa, walked us through the cuts and presented the night’s selections at the table. We chose the zabuton, a wagyu Denver steak with the kind of marbling that gives each bite plenty of richness without turning heavy, and the in-house dry-aged ribeye, which arrived with a good char, cooked to a proper medium rare and sliced before it hit the table.
Ezio’s also offers a vacca matura steak, cut from a mature dairy cow. That style of beef has a deeper, more developed flavor than what comes from younger cattle, with more minerality, more funk, and more of the sort of intensity that people who care about steak tend to chase. It’s the kind of detail that says something about the restaurant’s ambitions without requiring anyone to make a speech about them.
Pasta with clams
Sides rounded things out well. A simple arugula salad with aged Parmigiano Reggiano cut through the richness of the meat, while the Potatoes Ezio, essentially crisp hash browns with onions and scallions, delivered exactly what they needed to. They were salty, crunchy, and gone quickly.
We skipped dessert this time, though a previous visit left an impression with the house-made vanilla soft serve finished with Sicilian olive oil. The grassy, slightly peppery oil against the sweet creaminess of the ice cream made for a smart, restrained dessert, which is not always a sentence that can be said about Miami.
Service helped hold the night together. Carlo was attentive without hovering and knew the menu well enough to guide rather than recite. Later, near the restaurant’s in-house dry ager, I spoke with chef Carlo Mirarchi, Ezio’s co-owner, who shared that the restaurant is named for his father, a native of Calabria. It’s a personal detail, but one that explains something about the restaurant. The place never feels anonymous.
The dry ager
Miami has had no shortage of restaurant imports from New York, many of them arriving with plenty of hype and a fully formed sense of self-importance. Ezio’s avoids that trap. It brings real pedigree, but it also feels adjusted to its setting, comfortable in South Florida without sanding off what made it interesting.
The night’s steaks
Soft serve with olive oil
Ezio’s gives North Beach something it could use more of: a restaurant with ambition, skill, and enough warmth to keep the whole thing from feeling performative. The food is strong, the space works well, and the people running it seem to understand the difference between style and substance. That’s a good reason to go back.
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