Lucali

Wine bottles at the counter

The dough meets the counter before the room fills; Mark Iacono, chef at Lucali in Miami Beach, keeps the work tied to the plain pie rather than the performance around it. The method carries south from the Brooklyn house he founded in 2006, when a former childhood candy store in Carroll Gardens became the fixed point of his practice. Lucali Miami opened in 2013 as an extension, not a reinvention. The brief stayed narrow: handmade thin-crust pizza, calzones, a wood-fired brick oven, and a room arranged so the bench remains visible.

Iacono’s training did not begin in restaurants. It began in construction, granite, and marble fabrication, trades that teach the hand to read weight, pressure, edge, and finish. That background matters here because the pizza depends on the same kind of restraint. The dough is rolled thin, reportedly with wine bottles, then dressed without burying the structure. His own language around the work is spare: “It’s really about the pizza.” The line is useful because it does not try to enlarge the subject. At Lucali, the subject is already large enough.

A plain pie with basil

The house is known for a plain pie built on tomato sauce, three types of cheese, and fresh basil, carried on a thin, light, chewy crust. That is the center of the program. Around it, the Miami Beach kitchen keeps calzones, Baked Artichokes, Eggplant Parm, Meatballs, Chicken Wings, Kale Caesar salad, pastas such as Spicy 3 Cheese Fusili and Ravioli, and a Nutella dessert pizza. The list is broader than the Brooklyn origin, but the discipline still turns on dough, heat, sauce, cheese, and timing.

The oven gives the room its pace. Pies go in pale and come out with the edges set, the basil still reading fresh against the cheese, the crust carrying enough chew to hold the cut. Toppings have a familiar pizzeria grammar: artichoke hearts, pepperoni, shallots, onion, garlic, hot pepper, sweet pepper, mushrooms. None of them matters if the base loses its line. Iacono’s work at Lucali has always treated return as the measure, not arrival. “I don't get excited when someone comes here, but I get excited when they come back.”

The room around the oven

The room in Sunset Harbour keeps the rustic vocabulary of the first house: plank floors, chunky tables, candlelit surfaces, and an open kitchen where the oven can be seen doing its work. The setting is relaxed, but the bench gives it structure. Guests sit close enough to read the sequence: dough opened, sauce spread, cheese laid down, basil placed, pie moved toward heat. The craft is not hidden behind a wall, and it does not need theatre added to it.

Bay Club, the adjoining bar, changes the edge of the evening with cocktails and entertainment, but Lucali’s center remains the oven and the counter. In 2022, Lucali Miami received a Michelin Bib Gourmand designation, recognition attached to this Miami Beach address. Iacono names the return himself, a guest coming back for another plain pie with basil at Lucali Miami.