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.
Last night, the second night Torno Subito was open in its new home at The Moore Building, the bar already felt like the center of Miami’s Design District. It’s Art Walk, so every stool was claimed by someone who deals in canvases instead of spreadsheets. Art buyers hugged, gallery owners did the double-cheek kiss, everyone looked like they had somewhere important to be next, and nobody seemed in any hurry to get there. This is exactly how Massimo Bottura hoped it would look: the bar of his only U.S. restaurant jammed with customers, just two days after the doors opened.
Torno Subito, the playful offshoot of Bottura’s restaurants, has moved from downtown Miami to The Moore, the landmark building that has become a kind of shared living room for people who treat art, design, and cocktails as non-negotiables. It replaces the very good but oddly quiet Elastika as the ground-floor, public-facing restaurant. Upstairs are the members’ club and a petite hotel; down here, you sit under Zaha Hadid’s wild Elastika sculpture and try to figure out if dinner or the ceiling is the main event.
Bottura has called The Moore “an irresistible destination,” and it makes sense. The project comes from WoodHouse, the hospitality group led by Brady Wood and Simon Sorpresi, who seem intent on turning buildings into social ecosystems rather than simple leases.
Torno Subito’s entrance
In the kitchen, chef Bernardo Paladini is tasked with making Bottura’s thesis legible in Miami: Italian food as a conversation between fast and slow, old and new, the Riviera gone slightly surreal. Torno Subito has always been the playful sibling in the family, with serious technique and a sense of humor.
Zaha Hadid’s Elastika
The temporary menu
Bottura didn’t need to do much to the old Elastika space, and so the changes are subtle. There’s no Torno Subito sign out front, just the name of the building above the glass doors. Inside, there’s new, colorful faux leather on the big, curved booths. The arches behind the bar also got a dose of color, along with the big insets into the walls that now have red and yellow swoops surrounding sections of white and black stripes. It’s garish-slash-attractive and not in any way as colorful as the old funhouse-like space downtown, more like the Italian Riviera home of an eccentric count.
Nudging through last night’s crowd, we joined the crush at the bar, grabbing the one empty stool and then inheriting a second from the generous group next to us. Drinks came first. The Torno Martini leaned sweeter than I expected, a kind of vacation martini that seems designed for people who do not have emails to answer the next morning. The white Negroni had all the bitterness you want, but it drank like somebody whispered the word “gin” over the glass instead of pouring it in.
We ordered the $24 burger, planning to split it, but the bartender suggested the slider version instead. It arrived in two bright boxes that looked like upscale takeout, the kind of packaging that makes you feel like you should unbox it on TikTok. The diminutive slider inside, at $12 each, is not the smashed, greasy bar burger of your dreams; it is a composed little thing, Italian curly-leaf parsley pesto the loudest voice in the room, the patty itself veering toward meatloaf. It is clever, it is clearly thought through, and I am not sure it ever quite hits the primal burger button.
The slider
The Parmesan pizza does. It comes sliced, then pulled apart and fanned across the plate, big hunks of roasted eggplant scattered where you would expect pools of cheese. There is no cheese on the pie itself, just a cacio e pepe sauce draped over each slice of crust like a finishing flourish. At $28, it might be the most expensive truffle-free pizza of my life, but it is also the dish I can already hear people writing essays about: the leopard-spotted, airy crust; the perfectly roasted, almost meaty eggplant; the way the peppery sauce steps in for mozzarella without trying to imitate it.
Eggplant Parmesan pizza
The updated dining room
This was just a quick reconnaissance mission, a couple of things at the bar to see how Torno Subito fits inside The Moore. I will be back soon for a full dinner, when the room is less new and the team has settled into its rhythm. There are about 90 seats, lunch Tuesday through Friday, dinner Tuesday through Saturday, Sunday brunch, and a bar that runs all day. For now, though, the move already feels less like a relocation and more like a puzzle piece snapping into place: Modena’s most famous storyteller finally has a Miami stage loud enough to match him.
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