RESTAURANT NEWS | MIAMI
Fina Prime Brings a Family’s Italian Cooking to North Miami
The new restaurant at SoLé Mia serves tableside cacio e pepe, grilled branzino, and wood-fired pizza on a waterfront patio.
FINA PRIME | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Maria Rodriguez
7:44 a.m. ET, Nov. 12, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.
The patio at Fina Prime sits a few steps from the water, the tables set with white napkins and smoked glasses, palms throwing long shadows in the late sun. Laguna SoLé is right there, seven acres of it, and the whole point of the place is that dinner comes with the lagoon in view.
Fina Prime Italian opened Oct. 26 in SoLé Mia, the 184-acre community rising between Biscayne Boulevard and Biscayne Bay in North Miami. It’s the new restaurant from sisters Samantha and Stacey Cooper, with chef Pedro Valdes in the kitchen, and it seats about 200 in a 4,000-square-foot dining room designed by Michael Baccaro of MDB Designs.
For Stacey Cooper, the restaurant is a return. She moved to Florida when she was nine, and her parents opened their first Italian restaurant in South Florida 54 years ago. It’s still open. “Miami is where my heart is, and it always will be,” she said. Samantha brings more than 25 years in hospitality, from New York to Miami, and the two of them built Fina Prime as the kind of neighborhood place you come back to, for lunch, for drinks with friends, for a family dinner, for a celebration.
Valdes, who has three decades in restaurant kitchens, cooks the menu around a Josper grill and a wood-fired oven. The cacio e pepe is finished tableside. The ribeye and the branzino come off the Josper, the branzino whole and crisp-skinned. The pizzas come out of the wood-fired oven, the Dolce Vita Pizza and the margherita, and the pastas are made in-house, fettuccine tartufo nero and spaghetti pomodoro among them. Crispy calamari starts the meal, tiramisu ends it, and the gelato is made in-house on a Carpigiani machine.
The dining room is built for the neighborhood as much as the occasion: an indoor-outdoor bar, a private dining room, televisions for game days, and the patio on the lagoon. Lunch and dinner run daily, brunch lands on the weekends, and the kitchen also does catering and delivery.
SoLé Mia is still filling in, a little more than 1,000 residents so far, with 4,390 residences planned at full build-out. Fina Prime hopes it’ll slot in as the neighborhood restaurant in a neighborhood that’s still very much on the rise.
