Bellisio's Italian Restaurant & Wine Bar

The Restaurant

Bellisio's occupies a brick building at 405 South Lake Avenue in Canal Park, a block from the Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge — the working lift bridge that frames every postcard of the city — and a short walk from the Dewitt-Seitz Marketplace. The dining room is divided across two principal spaces: a candlelit main room with white linens, exposed brick, and a long banquette running the south wall; and a separate wine bar with a sommelier-staffed counter and a glass-fronted cellar of two hundred reserve bottles. The cellar runs to four thousand bottles across five hundred selections, and Bellisio's has held the Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence for twenty-five consecutive years — the longest unbroken run of any restaurant between Minneapolis and the Canadian border.

The cooking is classical Italian with a regional sweep: hand-rolled pappardelle with veal-and-pork ragù from the kitchen's slow-cooked Sunday gravy, osso buco alla Milanese with saffron risotto, grilled veal chop with rosemary jus, branzino in cartoccio with capers and Sicilian olives, a hand-stretched whole-roasted suckling pig from the wood oven for the larger tables. The pasta board changes weekly and runs a careful tour from northern Italy (tortellini in brodo, agnolotti dal plin) to the south (orecchiette with broccoli rabe and 'nduja). The dessert programme — a torta della nonna, a chocolate budino with sea salt, a tiramisù made tableside on the wine-bar side — has not changed in seven years for the reason that nothing about it needs to.

The wine programme is where the room earns its keep. The list runs by region with serious depth in Piedmont (Barolo and Barbaresco verticals from Vietti, Giacosa, and Gaja), Tuscany (Brunello reserves dating to the early 1990s, Super-Tuscans from Sassicaia and Ornellaia), Veneto Amarone, Sicily, and a careful section of cool-climate American producers. The sommelier walks the room and can pair the full Italian classical menu by the glass without ever opening a bottle the table doesn't ask for. By-the-glass selections run to one hundred and twenty-five wines, and the four-wine flights at the wine bar are one of the most enjoyable ways to spend an hour in the Upper Midwest.