BRAVO! Italian Restaurant & Bar

The Restaurant

BRAVO! Italian Restaurant & Bar sits on the upper level of Highland Village, the open-air upscale retail centre on I-55 in north Jackson that has anchored the city's affluent Belhaven Heights and Eastover dining clientele since the early 1980s. The dining room runs across a long rectangular space with high ceilings, exposed-wood beams, white tablecloths, low-lit pendant fixtures, and a marble-topped bar that runs the south wall. An open kitchen at the back faces the room, with a wood-fired pizza oven and a pasta station visible from the main dining floor. BRAVO! has been in continuous operation under the same ownership for more than two decades, a long Jackson run by any measure, and the kitchen has held the upscale-Italian standard for the Mississippi capital with rare consistency.

The cooking is classical Italian with a careful regional sweep. The pasta course is the room's strongest argument: hand-rolled pappardelle with veal-and-pork bolognese, ricotta gnocchi with brown butter and sage, lobster ravioli with a sherry-cream reduction, linguine with Manila clams in white wine, a signature spaghetti carbonara built with guanciale and Pecorino. The wood-fired pizza programme runs eight Neapolitan-style pies, a margherita, a sopressata-and-Calabrian-chile, a four-cheese, a mushroom-and-truffle, and is the casual half of the menu that handles a family lunch as easily as a date dinner. Secondi run a veal Milanese, an osso buco alla Milanese with saffron risotto, a Gulf seafood cioppino, a hand-cut ribeye with rosemary jus.

The wine list runs about one hundred and forty references with steady Italian depth, particular strength in Tuscany, Piedmont, and Sicily, and BRAVO! has held the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence for many consecutive years. The by-the-glass programme runs to twenty selections, and the bar staff can guide a careful Italian flight through a long evening. Service is gracious and Italian-flavoured, with captains who have worked the room for a decade or more, and a host team that knows the Highland Village regular clientele by face. BRAVO! handles a quiet two-top, a four-top of clients on the back banquette, and a six-top birthday celebration in the bar room with the practised ease of a long-running Jackson room.