Just like nonna’s house: This Italian spot in Miami Beach just opened a new restaurant

In Italy, restaurateur Luca D’Angelo was influential in bringing Campanian products — buffalo mozzarella, buffalo meat, Neapolitan pizza — to the forefront of Italian cuisine. In 2005, he opened his pizzeria Fratelli La Bufala on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach, serving hearty Italian fare with an accent on Neapolitan pizza.

Now, the concept carries on in Casa Bufala, D’Angelo’s second U.S. restaurant, a trattoria-and-pizzeria now open in Miami Beach’s Sunset Harbour neighborhood.

The cozy restaurant seats 60 diners inside and 40 diners outside on a patio. The interior walls of the 2,500-square-foot restaurant are decorated with contemporary artwork from Neapolitan artist Antonio Montariello. There’s also a 14-seat cocktail bar and open pizza oven accented with mosaic tiles.

The design, along with the menu, “was designed to whisk guests away on a trip to their favorite nonna’s house,” said D’Angelo in a statement.

The menu starts with antipasti: steak tartare, fried zucchini flowers stuffed with lemon ricotta; bruschetta with creamy Parmesan sauce and black truffle paste, Italian pumpkin cream soup.

There are plenty of wood-fired pizzas, made with buffalo mozzarella. One boasts caramelized porcini mushrooms and sausage with fresh basil; another, the Reale, with San Marzano tomato sauce and smoked mozzarella, ricotta, parma prosciutto. There’s also the Quattro Stagioni with sweet salami, artichoke, mushroom, ham, basil and black olives and the Suprema, which should delight the carnivores, with mini meatballs, sausage and Italian bacon.

The house specialty is the Bolognese pizza, with the restaurant’s signature Bolognese sauce and smoked provola cheese.

But diners aren’t limited to pizza. There are numerous pasta dishes, plus such entrees as chicken thighs with porcini mushrooms and truffle sauce; veal Milanese; almond-crusted salmon and salt-crusted Mediterranean sea bass with a lemon drizzle; and lobster gnocchi.

Sunset Harbour, D’Angelo said, has been a welcoming home for the brand, which plans to open a West Palm Beach location in 2024.

“We look forward to making Casa Bufala the new culinary anchor of the neighborhood,” D’Angelo said.

Casa Bufala

Where: 1874 Bay Road, Miami Beach

Hours: noon-11 p.m. daily; happy hour 4-7 p.m. daily with $6 beers, $8 wines by the glass and $8 cocktails

More information: (305) 397-8264