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.
Walking from my place in Midtown to dinner in Wynwood on Saturday night, we passed two very good Italian restaurants that were mostly empty, just two tables in both large dining rooms.
I expected the same at Sparrow Italia and instead found the long, dim bar was shoulder-to shoulder, people who couldn’t get a seat clutching martini glasses between the chairs. The hostess led us on a slow procession through a sunken dining room that was already buzzing and would be completely jammed by the time our entrees arrived. Whatever was happening a couple blocks in those quiet restaurants, the action—and the money—had clearly migrated here.
You can eat excellent Italian food in Miami at plenty of places, but newcomer Sparrow Italia has figured out how to turn dinner into a set piece. The London-born restaurant leans into that “night out” feeling with a big, moody space, lit mostly by table lights and decorated from above with a whale’s rib ceiling. This is an unsubtle Italian steakhouse built for people who want the whole package in one stop: good food, strong drinks, and the sense that something might happen while you’re there.
The food holds up its end of the bargain. We started with a hamachi crudo that looked like somebody storyboarded it: pastel slices of fish fanned out on the plate, overlapped with paper-thin cucumber, glossed with citrus and a touch of heat. It tasted as clean as it looked. The sopressata pizza followed, basically an adult version of a pepperoni pie. The crust was thin and crackery, with pockets of char along the edge, the whole thing riding that sweet-spicy line that makes you forget you allegedly came here to share.
The eggplant rollatini comes under a blanket of shaved Parm, each piece of the veg nicely crispy even under all that sauce and cheese. The Bolognese orechette came next, a luscious dish thanks to the wagyu beef used to build it.
Eggplant rollatini
Our server recommended the chicken Parm with a grin and a warning that it was roughly the size of our table. It landed as big as the pizza, a breaded slab under bright tomato and molten cheese, still somehow audibly crisp as they ran a pizza wheel through it and carved it into quarters.
Wagyu Bolognese
Chicken Parm
As I devoured the chicken parm, a thought hit me: there is no poultry on Earth shaped like this. It’s unmistakably fused chicken, stitched together into a giant wheel, and yet it eats like something far more honest: juicy, well seasoned, the crust still holding its crunch under all that sauce. The fact that a dish this theatrical works as well as it does is a testament to the kitchen. It is a stunt, but it delivers, which is maybe Sparrow in a single plate.
Hazelnut rocher
Dessert is where the spectacle shifts into overdrive. We had what may be their signature dessert in their short tenure in the city, a decadent ferrero rocher-inspired number of chocolate and hazelnut and vanilla ice cream to give it balance.
Gelato
But it was the gelato that wowed. Three scoops arrive in a massive clear teardrop of ice, like it had been rescued from a glacier and repurposed as a centerpiece. It keeps the gelato cold, sure, but it also stops conversation at nearby tables as phones come out and everyone pretends not to be staring. All around us, pastas, steaks, and pizzas were landing under that flattering amber light, the room humming at the particular frequency of people spending more than they meant to and not regretting it yet.
About halfway through our meal, a four-piece band squeezed onto a tiny stage and skipped the usual soundcheck theater. They just dropped straight into Motown and funk, the singer slipping offstage and working the room, singing between tables while servers threaded through with martinis and chicken Parm. It felt like a supper club run through a modern filter: live music, big plates, a crowd that clearly dressed for the night.
Crispy baby potatoes
On the walk back, we passed those quiet restaurants again, their tables still half-empty. They might be serving lovely bowls of cacio e pepe, but Sparrow is selling something different: an entire night in one room. If what you want is a low-key plate of pasta and an early bedtime, plenty of places will happily oblige. If you want hamachi that looks like design homework, a chicken Parm the size of a steering wheel, and a band tearing it up while your dessert glows inside a block of ice, you go to Sparrow—and you understand why everyone else went there too.
