Luxuriously Lavish Luca
Inventive Italian food, Explosive Flavors
We make Italian flavors with Hispanic intensity.” That’s how Chef Giorgio Rapicavoli – a half-Italian, half-Argentinian Miami native – describes Luca Osteria, his fine-dining Italian restaurant on Giralda Plaza. And we can’t disagree.
Rapicavoli has become one of the biggest culinary stars in South Florida, with three restaurants in and around Coral Gables: Luca Osteria, Eating House (right next door on Giralda), and Mayfair Grill, which just opened in Coconut Grove in August. He’s been a semifinalist for several James Beard Awards, including Rising Star Chef in 2013 and Best Chef in the South in 2015 and 2016. He was one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2012. And, in 2011, he was featured on the Food Network’s “Chopped” as Miami’s first winner.


TRUFFLE PASTA WITH TRUFFLE SHAVINGS (Left) and BUCATINI ALL’AMATRICIANA (Right)
Almost every night (Tuesday through Sunday) you can find the chef making his rounds at Luca Osteria, a pandemic-era project that the says was “always something I wanted to do.” It’s been one of our favorite restaurants for years – even in the much-lauded and oversaturated Italian restaurant category in Coral Gables.

We started with one of our favorite appetizers, the patate fritte ($27). Here, Rapicavoi uses pommes noisettes, which are a French style of potatoes cut into small, round hazelnut shapes and coated in butter. They’re fried quickly and then tossed in a creamy parmigiano fonduta sauce with truffle; presented at the table, our waiter carefully drizzled egg yolk on top and mixed it in for added flavor.
Truffle is one of our favorite things, and Chef Giorgio,thankfully, agrees. “There’s nothing I dislike more than ordering atruffle supplement and it’s like three shavings,” he says disgustedly. “If you’re going to do it right, do a lot. That’s the beauty of luxury. These ingredients should be celebrated.” With that in mind, we doubled down and ordered the truffle pasta ($59) for a main as well.
An off-menu item, it’s pricy but worth it, and comes heaped with a mountain of black truffle shavings; so much so that we could barely
see the creamy pasta beneath. Like everything else on Rapicavoli’s menu, it manages to be both sumptuous and delicate, almost palatial in scale yet exquisitely flavorful.

Aside from an attention to flavor and ingredients (some of which are sourced locally but many of which come from Italy), there is also inventiveness in multitudes here. Take the “Cacio e Pepe” Caesar ($19), a classic salad with a peppery twist. Here, Rapicavoli sprinkles a generous dose of black pepper over romaine lettuce to offer a simple but innovative take that isn’t quite spicy but certainly more brash than you’d expect.
This simple twist-of-the-knife creativity comes across throughout his entire menu, which takes traditional Italian dishes and elevates them with a burst of untraditional flavor. For instance, the bucatini all’amatriciana ($37) – a classic pasta made with tomatoes – is dosed with an unexpected and pleasant dollop of homemade chili oil and shavings of prosciutto. Again, not quite spicy or completely unfamiliar – just different. A typical Roman dish, all’amatriciana is usually made with guanciale, an Italian cured meat made from pork cheek. Rapicavoli does it with prosciutto, the shank of the pig, because that muscle is used more and therefore has more flavor. And instead of regular tomatoes, he uses semi-dry tomatoes, which he says, “cuts through the fat of the prosciutto” with their added acidity.
But throw that out the window for one of Luca Osteria’s main event dishes. The lamb shank ($58), sourced from Niman Ranch Farms (a network of small independent U.S. family farmers) is perhaps the most traditional item on the menu. Served with a roasted butternut squash puree that Rapicavoli enhances with a sprinkling of nutmeg for autumnal flavor, it’s cooked in a red wine reduction and topped with fried rosemary and other crispy herbs. The sauce takes some of the sharpness out of the rosemary and the herbs give it textural complexity. “It’s very old-school,” the chef says.


LEFT: LAMB SHANK FROM NIMAN RANCH FARMS, AND RIGHT: ‘CACIO E PEPE’ CAESAR SALAD
Still, most of what Chef Giorgio does at Luca is just “what I like and what I’ve always wanted to do,” he says. “Sometimes Italian [flavoring] is just a little bit lighter and delicate. That’s not necessarily what we are. We like big flavor… I think about the way Latin food is seasoned. It’s kind of aggressively seasoned and very textural. We have that same approach, but we apply it to Italian cuisine.”
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