Milano Italian Grille

Milano Italian Grille operates out of a small storefront on NW 57th Street in Tamarac, in the western part of the city not far from Commercial Boulevard. It is a compact restaurant, small enough that the business itself advises calling ahead for a table on weekend nights, and that size is part of what gives the place its character. This is not a restaurant built for banquet hall turnover. It is built for a kitchen that can pay attention to what is going out on each plate because there are only so many plates going out at once.

The restaurant has been open under this name for close to two decades, long enough to have built a following of people who treat it as their default Italian order in this stretch of Tamarac. The menu draws from familiar Italian and continental categories, pizza, pasta, and grilled entrees, prepared without a lot of unnecessary flourish. Reviews from regulars consistently point to the same two things, that the food is dependable and the service moves quickly for a kitchen that size, though the small dining room means walk-ins on a Friday or Saturday night should expect a wait or plan to call ahead.

Hours are set up around a full lunch and dinner service through most of the week. The restaurant closes on Mondays, a common pattern for independent Italian kitchens that need a day to reset, and opens later on weekends, running from early afternoon into the evening on Saturday and Sunday rather than opening for a full lunch crowd. Tuesday through Thursday the restaurant runs closer to a standard 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. schedule, with Friday nights extending an hour later to catch the end of week dinner crowd.

Milano accepts all the major credit cards along with cash and checks, standard for a sit-down restaurant of this size, and the kitchen handles both dine-in and takeout orders. The pizza program in particular gets called out by customers as a reason to visit even on nights when a full sit-down dinner is not the plan. Being positioned along NW 57th Street rather than on University Drive or State Road 7 means Milano does not get the same drive-by visibility as some of Tamarac’s other Italian spots, which makes it more of a known quantity restaurant for people already living in the surrounding neighborhoods than a place tourists or first-time visitors happen upon.

For residents of this part of Tamarac, Milano Italian Grille functions as the kind of neighborhood restaurant that does not need heavy marketing to stay busy. It has stayed in the same location for years, kept a workable menu of pizza and Italian entrees, and built the kind of local reputation that keeps tables full on weekend nights even with a small dining room. Anyone planning a Friday or Saturday dinner here should call ahead, since the restaurant itself makes a point of recommending reservations when the room fills up.