Dining at La Màrtola is a Bright and Light Experience
When you first walk into La Mártola, the movie “Heaven Can Wait” comes to mind. Everything feels light and radiant and, well, white. The walls, the ceiling, the curtains – everything except the blonde wood of the chairs and side panels of the bar is white. Even the floors are an off-white beige, and the wait staff dresses in white linen.
For the summer months in Miami, this feeling is just what you want, a relief from the harsh heat. With its brightly painted, exposed ductwork overhead, it feels a little like a Soho loft reinvented into a luminous space. And the ambiance is mirrored by the menu, filled with light ‘European Riviera’ dishes that are simply prepared from fresh ingredients, some locally sourced and others imported from the coastal areas of the old world. No heavy spices are used here, only a variety of olive oils, different types of gourmet salts, and citrus.
Part of the culinary magic here is the use of wood for cooking – both for their pizza oven and for grilling their meats and vegetables. To get a sense of what that means, we sampled their Florida Vegetables – red and orange bell peppers, zucchini, onions, and eggplant straight from the farm. These were wood grilled with Sicilian extra virgin olive oil, mint, and oregano, and served with tahini and dill cream. Simple and wonderful. Equally fresh and tasty was their Frisée Salad, comprised of locally grown frisée lettuce enhanced by free-range poached eggs, Roquefort cheese, croutons, hazelnuts, duck lardons (bacon bits) and, in this case, Tuscan EVO.
At the other end of the sourcing spectrum are their dishes that use scampi and orata (bream fish) from the Mediterranean, and meats from the renowned Linz Heritage ranch in Oklahoma. We sampled an orta crudo bathed in lemon and Ligurian EVO, dressed with sprigs of arugula, laces of red onion, chopped baby tomatoes, and black taggiasca olives from the same Ligurian region of Italy as the olive oil. Exquisite, as were the grass-fed lamb chops from the Linz farm. We did not try the Fiorentina steak – a little steep at $220, even if it fed two.
The surprise on the menu was the array of excellent Neapolitan pizzas, a tribute to La Filiale, the restaurant in Erbusco, Italy, owned by La Mártola partner/investor Martino de Rosa. A tad pricey for their size ($22-$32) they are nonetheless as good as it gets in the world of pizzas, with an amazingly flavorful crust made from unprocessed Italian flour they let “rise” for 72 hours before baking.
To accompany such light cuisine we ordered a bottle of white Simonnet Febvre Saint-Bris de Sauvignon, from their expansive wine list. A French wine from Burgundy, it was not expensive and perfectly infused with notes of citrus, grapefruit, and lemon. “Everything here is very clean, very light,” manager Ahmed Roushdi explained. “We don’t use any butter or garlic or heavy spices, just different olive oils and salts… and the flour is shipped in every week from Italy.”
In addition to the main dining area, there is an outdoor terrace with its own bar. Lovely as it was, we preferred the cool interior, leaving the terrace for Miami’s winter months. We also liked the fact that, unless you know that Màrtola is located on the perimeter of the Design District, you won’t just stumble across it. It is a hidden gem on the edge of the Buena Vista neighborhood, not heavily trafficked. Paolo Domeneghetti, the New York food impresario who is de Rosa’s partner here, says La Màrtola provides “a space that inspires the art of savoring life.” By the time we reached their dessert gelato, we were in complete agreement.
