Terza Ristorante

The Restaurant

Terza Ristorante occupies the third floor of the 30 3rd Street SE tower in downtown Rochester — a glass-walled dining room that frames the Mayo Clinic skyline and the Plummer Building's twin towers through floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides. The dining floor runs about a hundred and ten covers across a long open parlor, with a chef's pass at the back of the room and an open pasta-rolling station that anchors the front. La Vetta Bar nel Cielo — Italian for 'the bar in the sky' — sits one floor above with its own rooftop programme. The geography is the working credential: the highest-altitude serious dining room in Rochester, with the city's clearest west-facing sunset view across the Mayo medical district.

The kitchen is run by chef Vincenzo Giangiordano, who trained in Italy's Abruzzo region near the city of Pescara and pulls pasta by hand from a back-of-house pasta board for every service. The menu is Italian-meets-Italian-American at its working chef-driven standard: hand-pulled tagliatelle alla bolognese with a slow-cooked ragu; the cacio e pepe finished tableside in a Pecorino wheel; the lasagna alla romana that has become the room's longest-running dinner plate; a wood-fired pizza programme on the Neapolitan side of the Roman line; veal scaloppini with Marsala; a daily fish course that the chef walks to each table. The bread is baked in-house twice daily; the gelato programme is made on the back wall of the open pass.

Service is the captain-led pace of a chef-driven Italian dining room that takes the working Mayo Clinic patient-family demographic seriously: the staff narrates the regional Italian distinctions without lecturing, the bar carries a working Italian-aperitivo card (Aperol and Campari spritzes, a careful Negroni programme, a small grappa selection on the digestif side), and the wine list — about two hundred and twenty labels with deliberate Tuscan Sangiovese, Piedmont Barolo and Veneto Amarone depth, plus a careful Californian and Oregon spine — pairs into the menu without requiring a sommelier round. The skyline view is the working differentiator: a Rochester room that gives the visiting guest something the city has never had before.