Most Coconut Grove dinners start with a walk down Main Highway or Commodore Plaza to see where there's a free table. The Grove's newest waterfront restaurant starts somewhere else. La Sponda sits across a short bridge on Grove Isle, a 20-acre guard-gated island in Biscayne Bay. Thomas and Kassidy Angelo of Gioia Hospitality Group opened it in mid-September at Vita at Grove Isle, 4 Grove Isle Drive. Because of where it sits, nearly everything about the evening gets decided before you leave the house.
That's the useful way to think about La Sponda. The gate shapes everything from the booking calendar to the menu.
The gate decides who gets dinner
As Resy's preview of the restaurant puts it, the island is gated and private, so La Sponda can't accept walk-ins. Driving over on a pleasant Friday to try your luck at the bar won't work. You need a reservation before the guard booth is any use to you.
Bar seats help. Resy says the bar can be booked like a table, and the full dinner menu is served there. For two people who want the room and the view without a long dinner, a bar booking is the closest thing to a casual drop-in.
Parking is decided for you as well. The La Sponda page on Resy says the restaurant offers valet parking only. If you live close enough to think of Grove Isle as a neighbor, a ride to the door is another option.
Booking backward from the date you want
Reservations open 30 days ahead, early in the morning, according to Resy. Pair that with the posted schedule and you have a planning calendar. Dinner runs five nights a week, and the restaurant's own site lists no Monday or Tuesday service.
| Day | Dinner hours |
|---|---|
| Monday and Tuesday | No service listed |
| Wednesday | 5 to 10 p.m. |
| Thursday to Saturday | 5 to 11 p.m. |
| Sunday | 5 to 10 p.m. |
For a reader planning this week, the window runs into early December. Holiday dinners need more lead time than that. Here's the sequence for a special-occasion table:
- Pick the night, then count back 30 days. A Saturday, December 19 dinner opens for booking around November 19. Set a reminder for that morning.
- Choose a Wednesday through Sunday. A birthday on a Monday or Tuesday means dinner the weekend before or after.
- Decide on the branzino when you book. The four-pound salt-crusted branzino, presented tableside, is preorder only. The restaurant's listed number is 786-761-5200.
- Book the bar if the dining room is full. Same menu, same night.
- Plan your outfit and your wine before the day. The next section covers both.
What to wear and what to leave at home
Once you're through the gate, the dress code applies. Resy's venue notes ask guests not to wear shorts of any kind, tank tops, flip-flops or baseball caps. Open-toed sandals aren't allowed for men, and neither are medical scrubs. The Infatuation's review calls the place plainly fancy, a restaurant "on a literal private island" with a dress code.
Leave the special bottle at home too. La Sponda doesn't offer corkage at any time. Its own cellar more than makes up for it. Wine Spectator, in a report carried by Wine Business, counted about 450 bottles on the opening list, with plans to reach 550 by the end of the first week of service. Wine director Daniel Bishop traveled through Italy with the team while the menu took shape.
Ordering at a restaurant built around the water
The menu covers a lot of Italy on purpose. "Rather than something focused on one region, like coastal Italian or Northern Italian or Southern Italian, we wanted to give people optionality on the menu," Thomas Angelo told Miami New Times. The choices include a 42-ounce Australian Wagyu bistecca Fiorentina, whole tiger prawns, caviar carbonara on rye fettuccine with dill, and Wagyu cannelloni filled with short rib, Burgundy truffles and unagi.
The Infatuation's October 27 review tells you to eat like the pelicans outside. Order the seafood, with the pastas and risotto as the exception. Its swaps also happen to save money.
| The Infatuation suggests | Instead of |
|---|---|
| Ricotta cavatelli, $34 | Lobster linguine, $75 |
| Orecchiette with fennel sausage, $42 | Paccheri with branzino, $65 |
The cavatelli is the dish with a backstory. The team spent six months perfecting the ricotta cavatelli al pomodoro. The orecchiette Pugliese comes with broccoli rabe and Calabrian chile alongside the sausage. The review also points to the branzino alla vernaccia and the polpo alla pignata, which pairs octopus with gnocchi.
Culinary director Daniel Ganem's menu starts at the raw bar. The orata crudo pairs sea bream with citrus and Gioia Leccino olive oil. The La Sponda tartare combines Petrossian caviar, bluefin tuna and scampi, finished with tomato sauce poured at the table. The Infatuation lists that tartare at $145. Even the oil is matched to the dish. Peppery Coratina comes with the bread, and the lighter Leccino goes with the crudo.
At the bar, Thomas Angelo suggests starting with a cocktail and a bar snack, such as fried risotto topped with tuna tartare or a hash brown with uni and caviar. The Infatuation's favorite cocktail is the Bellagio, which gets three spritzes from a perfume bottle once it's on the table. Dessert is house-made gelato with sauces and Amarena cherries, served at the table, an idea the team brought home from Barbaresco.
The room on the other side of the bridge
The view is what all that planning buys. The Infatuation describes stepping off the elevator into a dining room where Biscayne Bay fills the windows, with pink sunsets and dolphins in the water. Kassidy Angelo summed up the idea in Miami New Times:
"Miami does not have a lot of waterfront dining, which sounds a little bit like an oxymoron. It's nice to be able to have something to look at."
The restaurant took three years to develop. It began with a conversation between Thomas Angelo and Ugo Colombo, founder of CMC Group, about bringing a restaurant to Vita at Grove Isle. Martin Brudnizki Design Studio designed the room with furnishings and stone from Italy. A local artist painted Coconut Grove's peacocks onto custom lamps. Resy reports that the bar lamps also show flamingos and Vizcaya, so the neighborhood is on the fixtures as well as outside the windows.
The Miami Herald describes about 120 seats with white tablecloths, imported stone, hand-painted details, a baby grand piano and a private dining room. With no walk-ins on a gated island, a private-room evening needs the same advance planning as any other table.
What's still to come
The restaurant has announced lunch and brunch. Its homepage says both were "coming October 2026," but the posted hours still show dinner only. Check laspondamiami.com before planning a daytime visit. A bay view at noon would make Grove Isle a very different outing from the sunset dinners covered so far.
For now, La Sponda is dinner, five nights a week, by reservation. If you want to know where La Sponda sits on the Grove's food map, Manoli at 3540 Main Highway and Miami Slice at 2996 McFarlane Road both opened this summer. Both sit on mainland streets. La Sponda is the one across the water, and the one you book a month out.
An evening at La Sponda shows how Italian stone, painted lamps and a wall of bay glass can shape the way a room feels. Those same questions come up when you weigh a waterfront residence in the Grove or anywhere along Biscayne Bay. If dinner on Grove Isle has you thinking about how that light and setting would feel at home, Neila Granzoti is happy to walk through the options with you in English, Portuguese or Italian, at whatever pace suits you. Let's Connect.
