DANTE Tremont

The Restaurant

DANTE Tremont occupies the restored 1900-built First National Bank of Tremont at 2247 Professor Avenue, a stone Romanesque-revival landmark on the corner of Professor and Literary Road that anchors the south-central Tremont neighbourhood. Chef-owner Dante Boccuzzi - a Cleveland-area native who spent his early career as chef de cuisine at Aureole in New York under Charlie Palmer, then opened the Michelin-starred Silk Restaurant in Shanghai for Sir Terence Conran, then cooked at Armani Ristorante in Hong Kong - returned to Cleveland in 2007 and opened the original DANTE in 2010 inside this preserved bank building. The room is a deliberate piece of architectural restoration: the original twenty-foot pressed-tin ceiling, the bank's preserved oak teller cages now converted to wine display, the polished travertine floors, the original vault door visible from the main dining room, and Edison-bulb chandeliers throughout. The ground floor seats sixty across the main dining room and a small alcove; the basement vault has been converted into Ginko, an eight-seat omakase counter that operates as a restaurant-within-a-restaurant on the same nightly service.

The kitchen project is contemporary Italian filtered through Boccuzzi's New York-Shanghai-Hong Kong technical background. Hand-rolled pasta forms the spine of the menu and rotates with the season: cavatelli with braised oxtail and pecorino, agnolotti with brown-butter and sage, tagliatelle with white-truffle butter in season. The wood-fired pizza programme runs from a five-hundred-degree oak oven built into the original bank vault and produces some of the most-photographed pies in the city - the margherita with house-made fior di latte, the prosciutto-and-arugula, the burrata-and-truffle. The larger courses include a wood-grilled branzino, a forty-five-day dry-aged ribeye, a slow-braised lamb shank with polenta, and a small but rotating preparation of Boccuzzi's Asian-Italian crossovers (a uni linguine, a hamachi crudo with Calabrian chilli) that reference his Shanghai years.

Ginko, the basement sushi counter, is the city's quiet luxury - eight seats facing a single chef working an omakase progression of seventeen to twenty courses, served alongside a small but very serious sake list selected by a Kyoto-trained sommelier. The wine programme upstairs is the most carefully built Italian list in northeast Ohio: roughly four hundred references with real depth in Barolo, Brunello, Etna, Tuscan supertuscans, and a small but thoughtful selection of natural producers. Boccuzzi himself is at one of the two kitchens most services. For a Cleveland dinner that wants serious technique inside a genuinely beautiful room - the Tremont bank building is a destination in itself - DANTE delivers the architectural setting and the kitchen credentials simultaneously.