Knockout Italian

Miami May Not Have Its Own Little Italy, but It Does Have Randazzo’s

By Mark Goldberg

Randazzo’s provides a taste of Little Italy.

There is an introduction to Marc Randazzo’s Little Italy menu that explains his southern Italian-American immigrant soul food: “… the kind of food eaten in all the little Italys throughout America on Sunday afternoons.…” But it’s the closing line that best describes what makes his food so good: “We love food, we love to feed people and we love life.”

Randazzo, a former WBC light welterweight champion, absorbed his love of cooking from his mother and grandmother as a child in Chicago’s Little Italy. By the time he was 12, he was preparing full family meals himself.

He puts that passion into every one of his dishes today. He also puts in more than 100 hours a week — stirring his gravies for hours, making his sausages and sauces, his dressings and specials. The food “needs the love, the passion, even when you just toss the salad,” he says. His diners feel the same way, based on the line waiting for tables in the entryway and dozens more queued up outside.

The restaurant is studded with boxing paraphernalia and photos. Randazzo’s boxing career included 16 knockouts. His Seafood Salad ($17) is another hit. The dish literally overflowed with perfect shrimp, calamari, octopus, crab legs and a lobster tail in lemon dressing prepared with extra virgin olive oil, sea salt and a little garlic. Not only was this a family favorite Randazzo’s mother made every Christmas Eve, it was also considered the best seafood salad ever tasted on the NBC series The Restaurant. Another dish, Randazzo’s Chopped Salad ($12), was the ultimate blend of lettuce, tomato, red onion, roasted red peppers, salami, provolone and gorgonzola cheeses, chickpeas, celery, pepperoncini and three different olives.

The Rigatoni Vodka and Prosciutto Mancini ($20) combined the al dente pasta with bits of prosciutto and onions in a light marinara sauce hit with butter, cream and a shot or two of vodka. We would have liked to try it with the neck bones and spare ribs, but only three servings daily are prepared that way.

When you’re talking pasta, you have to consider meatballs. Randazzo’s meatballs are monsters. The two in the Meatball Salad Ferraro ($15) were the size of bocce balls. Only these blends of beef, veal and pork were so light it was amazing they didn’t float off our plate. Joining the meatballs were several nice cuts of pork, so soft they melted in our mouth, along with some ricotta cheese. It was all splashed with Sunday gravy, a tomato sauce that takes a half-day to prepare.

Apparently, the seafood salad wasn’t mama’s only yuletide tradition. She also cooked up a tasty Christmas Eve Bacalao ($24). Pieces of fresh codfish were barely breaded, then sautéed slowly with tomatoes, olives, capers, basil and a splash of pinot grigio to which were added celery and potatoes. Randazzo must have known I was coming, because his evening special was Osso Bucco ($36). The massive veal shank — braised for four and a half hours with celery, carrots, garlic, lemon zest, tomatoes, white wine, chicken stock and a creative appearance by a bit of anchovy — was fall-from-the-bone perfection. The veal rested on a bed of risotto Milanese and was topped with Randazzo’s Sunday gravy.

The Cannoli ($7) were cannabulous, loaded with a rich ricotta and studded with pistachio bits.

Nothing is done small at Randazzo’s. Prepare to take home leftovers. Everyone else does. In fact, Randazzo’s goes through 3,000 to-go boxes a week. Regular readers of this column know that we usually taste quite a number of dishes for a review. But there was just so much food on each of our platters that we couldn’t handle any more. We’ll very happily have to come back for round two sometime soon.

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