Massimo Bottura Opens Torno Subito in Miami
The world-class chef offers a technicolor love story to the Italian Rivera
Torno Subito Miami, a restaurant by Massimo Bottura, opens tomorrow in Downtown Miami — on the roof of a food hall.
If you think that sounds like an unusual place for one of the world’s greatest chefs to plop down a restaurant, you’d be correct.
But Torno Subito isn’t meant to be some overly prissy restaurant. Instead, it’s a Fellini-esque eatery filled with a mixture of primary colors that offers everything from wood-fired pizzas to eight-course tasting menus.
Bottura first opened the Torno Subito concept in Dubai in 2019 with chef Bernardo Paladini at the helm. The restaurant, Bottura’s only venue outside of Italy, offers a Riviera-themed restaurant decorated in beachy, pastels of greens and pinks. The restaurant received a Michelin Star for its casual-yet-beautiful fare.
For the Miami iteration of Torno Subito, the same chef — Bernardo Paladini — has moved to the Sunshine State to helm the kitchen. He’s been here for over a year now, prepping the team and firing up the giant yellow wood-burning oven that churns out pizzas and other items.
The restaurant doesn’t officially open until tomorrow, but it’s been soft-opened for about a week. I had dinner there the other night and found it utterly charming from the entrance to the limoncello nightcap on the outdoor patio.
Although the restaurant is attached to the Julia & Henry Food Hall (and is a partnership with the food hall’s operators, King Goose Hospitality), you enter Torno Subito from a separate red entrance around the corner. From there, you’ll take a red elevator to the rooftop restaurant, which is smaller and far more casual than I had expected. Navigating the space between the thin, red bar and the open kitchen and yellow oven, you‘ll find the dining room.
The space is decorated in bright pop culture reds, yellows, and blues, giving you the feeling you’ve stepped into a Roy Lichtenstein poster. The 70s-inspired lighting includes Sputnik chandeliers and a hanging plastic cloud lamp, circa Conran’s 1980.
The patio (quite unlively on a humid, rainy Miami summer evening), offers the same red bar (an indoor/outdoor affair) and cozy seating, with some claustrophobic views of Miami’s mass of high rises springing up like mushrooms after a storm. The music continues the 1970s-Italian-pop culture vibe with a mix of pop from Italy and the USA (I particularly dug an Italian band covering the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer”).
The restaurant offers either a la carte dining or the “La Dolce Vita” tasting menu of eight courses of the restaurant’s greatest hits for $165 (with an optional wine and cocktail pairing for $110). Since this was my first time experiencing the restaurant, we opted for the tasting menu but I can see myself returning to dine at the bar for a glass of wine and a dish.
The first course was an excellent bread, accompanied by Bottura’s own olive oil from Modena. Other dishes included a take on a shrimp cocktail, a scallop finished in the wood oven, and a Milano/Portofino risotto (cooked in both langostine juice and bone marrow to signify two different regions). The seabass porketta — a piece of Mediterranean seabass, stuffed with pork bacon — was outstanding, as was the pizza my friend received as a pork-free substitution (unlike other restaurants that offer tasting menus, the staff happily changed dishes on the fly to accommodate her dietary restriction).
The standout dish was the tiny, doll-sized tortellini filled with equal parts beef and pork. The precious pastas are served in a creamy parmigiano reggiano sauce. The dish, I am told, was inspired by Chef Bottura’s Nonna. It’s a rustic dish that’s made heavenly in this iteration. It’s offered on the a la carte menu for $52, which may seem steep until you learn that one woman hand makes hundreds of tortellini each morning for that day’s service. That tortellini is the equivalent of a Hermes Birkin bag.
Torno Subito is an interesting concept. If you walked into the restaurant with no idea who Massimo Bottura was, you might think it was just another Italian bistro that made its way to Miami, as so many do.
At some point, however, the knowledgeable staff, pristine food, and attention to detail clue you in that you’re not in some tourist trap of a restaurant.
I will return for another visit to Bottura’s technicolor vision of the Italian Rivera. The tortellini alone is worth an encore.