La Sponda, a New Luxury Italian Restaurant, Opens in Miami
For a restaurant operator with a white-tablecloth steakhouse that serves $375 Rosewood Ranch wagyu porterhouses, hosts $1,200-per-person dinners featuring ultra-premium LVMH wines (including Château Cheval Blanc and Château d’Yquem) and has brought in guest chefs from Casa Julian, Rockpool and Borgo Egnazia for exclusive events, Daniel’s Miami proprietor Thomas Angelo unironically says he thinks a lot about “approachability.”
Angelo, who runs Gioia Hospitality with his daughter Kassidy, is quick to talk about Daniel’s bar menu, the restaurant’s under-$20 cocktails, its specially priced Miami Spice menus and how it discounts its 2,000-selection wine list by 25 percent at lunch.
“Yesterday, we had 195 lunches in the restaurant,” Angelo tells Observer. “We did $15,000 for lunch and sold $5,000 in wine. Value is super important. You have a top 5 percent that will come in and don’t care how much they spend. They’ll buy a bottle of Petrus. But that’s 5 percent, maximum, of your guests. Everyone else is looking for value in today’s world, with higher gas prices and higher food prices. We have a wine list with many bottles under $100.”
Even at the top tier of Miami dining, balance matters. So at La Sponda, which Gioia Hospitality and culinary director Danny Ganem are opening at Ugo Colombo’s Vita at Grove Isle luxury residential development on September 19, Angelo has a similar formula in mind.
“It’s really important to me that there are pastas on the menu that are under $50 that are still great,” he says.
Ganem, who also runs the kitchen at Daniel’s, has one clear goal with his cooking: “We want to wow the guests,” he tells Observer. “Our goal is to create an experience where people finish their meal, and they say, ‘Wow.’ The cooks understand that everything that is being done is to wow the guests.”
Daniel’s, which is ranked No. 40 on the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants and is No. 9 in North America and No. 1 in Florida on that list, has ascended to the top of the Miami meatery scene. La Sponda will serve beef of the same quality. Ganem says that sourcing the best ingredients is the first part of his wow-factor process.
“I spend a lot of time throughout the week curating the steaks at the restaurants,” he says. “We’re bringing in, for example, Mayura Station wagyu from Australia. It’s cattle that are fed chocolate. We have another one, Sir Harry, that gets fed citrus, and you find those notes. We just continue pushing. There’s always another ranch that people are talking about, so we bring in the beef, and we taste it.”
At the 120-seat La Sponda, Ganem has also been blending different sauces to make lobster pasta during R&D. He’s been working on cannelloni with short ribs and Vacche Rosse cheese. La Sponda will serve caviar pasta and truffle-topped pasta with the option of white truffles when they are in season.
But again, Angelo, who grew up eating Italian-American food in the Bronx, cares a lot about value.
“If you only have things that are hyper-expensive, what you have is a special occasion restaurant,” he says. “We’re in a residential community on this island where you’ve got guests who’ve purchased these 65 beautiful units, and they may come three, four times a week. They may come with their friends on Saturday and want a beautiful porterhouse, a beautiful steak with black truffles or caviar. Or they may come on Monday and have an incredible chicken dish or cavatelli pomodoro.”
Angelo mentions how Scarpetta’s spaghetti pomodoro has always been its best-seller, so dialing in the perfect tomato sauce is probably even more important than sourcing truffles or caviar. Angelo pays close attention to what he experiences at other restaurants, and he tapped Martin Brudnizki Design Studio for La Sponda after admiring its work at Thomas Keller’s Surf Club.
Angelo’s family is from Puglia, and La Sponda is on a guard-gated 20-acre island in Biscayne Bay near Coconut Grove, but he’s thinking beyond “coastal Italian” at his new restaurant. He wants the food at La Sponda to reflect many parts of Italy.
“We want to have the regional cuisines of Italy, and I kind of charged Danny with coming up with dishes that would represent all of Italia, not just Puglia,” says Angelo, who’s traveled extensively around Italy with Ganem and wine director Daniel Bishop.
La Sponda will feature delicate crudos and colossal wagyu bistecca Fiorentina on a menu that also showcases spaghetti alla chitarra al tartufo with Burgundy truffles, cultured butter and Parmigiano espuma; linguine all’astice with Maine lobster, fennel, ginger wine and pomodoro; and branzino alla Vernaccia with Taggiasca olives, potatoes, tomatoes and basil. Ganem’s team will make fresh pasta daily and also use extruded pasta to serve dishes true to their Italian origins.
And like at Daniel’s, La Sponda will host special big-ticket wine dinners.
“We’re already lining up Antinori and Gaia to come,” Angelo says. “And Danny’s got a little secret we can’t announce yet, but he’s got a relationship with a three-star Michelin chef who’s very famous in Italy, and we’re working on something.”
That said, Angelo very much wants to attract new customers who might not yet know much about pricey wine or Michelin stars.
“When I went out to eat in my 30s, I wasn’t buying $2,300 of wine,” he says. “I was looking for bottles that were $45 and $50. Cultivating that younger guest is important to us.”
La Sponda, located at 5 Grove Isle Dr., Miami, FL 33133, will initially open for dinner on Wednesday through Sunday.