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.
Francesco Martucci’s Miami restaurant has a signature that shows up in every video and on every table: the Pizza a Due, where the dough is fried first and then baked. It is the dish that helped make his original restaurant, I Masanielli in Italy, a pilgrimage stop. It is a dish that has been catnip for TikTok. The problem is that it eats like an overconfident stunt.
Last night, our Pizza a Due arrived screaming hot, and so taking a bite at its most crispy, crackly moment means absolutely annihilating your mouth. As it cools, the texture turns chewy and unpleasant, the whole thing collapsing into a heavy, oily mass that makes the “award-winning” story feel like the main ingredient. At its best, this is a dish that’s like carnival fried dough covered in pizza ingredients.
That would be an ordinary complaint if Martucci were an ordinary chef. He is not. His pizzeria I Masanielli opened in 2017 in Caserta, 22 miles north of Naples, and it has piled up accolades. It has been ranked the No. 1 pizzeria in the world by 50 Top Pizza five different times, and it was the only pizzeria to land among Food & Wine’s 2024 Global Tastemakers top international restaurants. The Miami restaurant is Martucci’s first expansion outside of Italy after years of saying no to far-flung offers. The new restaurant arrives as a test of whether that reputation holds when it has to operate in real time under American expectations and American pricing.
Just days after opening, getting a reservation already feels like part of the story. The only table I could find last weekend was 4:30 on Sunday, which in Miami is typically considered late brunch. The room was nearly full when I arrived anyway, which is the clearest sign of momentum a new restaurant can have: people showing up early because the slot exists.
The space appears to have given a light update to a room that used to hold Log (a name that still sounds like a practical joke). There’s a big bar off to the right, a pair of pizza ovens behind a glass partition in the back, and a dramatic glass-encased wine cellar set into the center-left like an art installation. The room is all dark woods and a moody glow, with dark leather placemats on wooden tables, the kind of look that signals seriousness without turning the whole place into a stage set. It is beautiful and it feels important, which matters because the location does not hand out foot traffic. The restaurant sits down a side street across from Hiyakawa, which means the crowd is there on purpose. Nobody is wandering in after noticing a sign.
The meal, like the Pizza a Due, moved between spectacle and substance. The $200 tasting menu was an easy skip, mostly because it sounded too narrow: a deep-fried frittatina, two fried pizzas, three Neapolitan-style pizzas, an A5 wagyu steak, and tiramisu. That is a lot of dough (both the flour and paper kind) and a lot of frying before the menu takes a left turn into steakhouse territory, and it did not read like a thoughtful progression so much as a maximalist checklist.
The house negroni, made with gin steeped with sage, showed the same tendency toward strong opinions. The sage is not a supporting player. It is the drink. The first sip felt bracing, even pleasant, and then the herb took over the whole experience in a way that was both impressive and slightly exhausting.
An amuse bouche arrived in a tiny terra-cotta pot: cauliflower purée topped with burnt breadcrumbs, with a bean shoot rising up like a miniature plant, a cute visual flourish. The flavor was less cute. The base note had that overcooked cauliflower taste, like the smell left behind in the house after cooking it. It was a small bite that managed to feel like a warning.
The Orto Mediterraneo salad followed and looked gorgeous in the way modern restaurants love: perfect squares of tomato and papaya arranged like a geometric pattern, as if a chef brought a ruler to the line. The first bite killed the illusion. The tomatoes were mealy and underripe, like supermarket beefsteaks that had been refrigerated and then rushed into duty. One still had the green, tough bit where the stem once was. The “crunchy chia” was not crunchy. The rose-scented dressing was nearly flavorless. The dish looked like a headliner and tasted like a dud.
The standard pizza showed up, and finally we had something to understand the hype. The Mani di Velluto came with a slightly sweet cream sauce made from buffalo milk, fennel sausage, and an aged pecorino that melted into the surface like butter. The crust was unbelievably light and airy with the perfect amount of char, the kind of Neapolitan structure that feels engineered: pillowy where it should be, crisp where it needs to be, and never soggy under the toppings. This is where Martucci’s reputation makes sense, because this is a pizza that feels special. The problem is the price tag. At $32, that pizza enters a category where “excellent” is not quite enough. Miami has Neapolitan-style pies that compare for far less money, including at Stanzione 87 and maybe even Pummarola down the street. The pizza is impressive. The pricing asks for reverence.
The fried pizza, the parmigiana with fried eggplant slices, red sauce, and fior di latte, brought the meal back to the central question here: just because something can be fried does not mean it should be. The ingredients tasted high-quality and the concept was undeniably original, but it still felt like an answer to a problem nobody has ever had. Pizza, made richer, heavier, and more fatiguing, is not automatically better pizza. The deep fryer makes the whole thing louder, and loudness is not flavor.
We skipped dessert. Watching the next table pour espresso over gelato was enjoyable in a purely observational way, but the kitchen had not earned another thousand calories of our trust.
By the end, the restaurant looked the way it wants to look: busy, dark, handsome, and full of people who came because the internet told them this mattered. A few dishes did matter, especially when the kitchen stopped trying to perform and simply made great pizza. The rest was a reminder that no amount of hype or short-form video can improve what happens after the heat fades and the fried dough has to stand on its own.
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