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.