Best Old-School Italian Restaurant

Long before Coral Gables became one of South Florida’s hottest dining destinations, Bugatti was making fresh pasta on Ponce de Leon Boulevard. The restaurant’s story began in May 1985 as La Romagnola, a small retail shop devoted to freshly made pasta. It served only a couple of sampling dishes each day, but the food caught on quickly. The pasta operation outgrew the space, the machines moved to a separate production facility, and the original storefront became the restaurant Gableites now know as Bugatti.

Four decades later, pasta is still at the heart of the place. Fresh egg pasta can be paired with sauces such as Bolognese, pomodoro, pesto and carbonara, while ravioli and other pasta preparations reflect the restaurant’s original specialty. Over the years, the menu has expanded to include seafood, chicken, meat, pizza, risotto and traditional Italian starters, but Bugatti has never wandered far from the identity that made it a neighborhood favorite in the first place.

Then there is Wednesday. Bugatti’s lasagna became so popular in its early La Romagnola days that the restaurant established a special Lasagna Day on the first Wednesday of each month. Eventually, demand became great enough that Lasagna Day expanded to every Wednesday. In the Gables, that’s the sort of restaurant tradition that needs little explanation among longtime regulars. You simply know what Wednesday means at Bugatti.

There is something increasingly valuable about a restaurant that doesn’t feel compelled to reinvent itself every few years. Bugatti has evolved, but the essentials remain familiar: an intimate dining room, attentive service, fresh pasta, Italian comfort food and a staff that has welcomed generations of customers. The restaurant itself notes that third-generation patrons now dine there just as their grandparents did when the doors first opened.

That’s what makes Bugatti genuinely old school. It isn’t a new restaurant designed to look nostalgic. It earned the nostalgia one plate at a time. For four decades of fresh pasta, Wednesday lasagna, familiar hospitality and a remarkable place in Coral Gables dining history, Bugatti is the Coral Gables Gazette’s selection for Best Old-School Italian Restaurant.