Avanzare Italian Dining

The Restaurant

Avanzare Italian Dining sits on South Fremont Avenue in a free-standing villa-style building just south of the Battlefield Mall, twenty minutes from downtown Springfield, and has held the South-side white-tablecloth-Italian brief since the early 2000s. The dining room is divided across three intimate zones — a main parlour with a working fireplace, a window-side conservatory under low pendant lighting, and a private back room for parties of up to twenty — all dressed in linen, lit at candlelight intensity, and styled with a Tuscan-villa colour palette of warm yellows and terracotta. The bar at the front holds about eight stools and operates as a working pre-dinner aperitivo programme.

The cooking is Northern Italian with a careful regional spine: Lombard risottos (a saffron Milanese, a porcini and truffle, a seasonal asparagus); Piedmontese pastas (tajarin with bone-marrow ragù, agnolotti dal plin filled with veal, ricotta gnocchi in brown butter); Tuscan secondi (an osso buco with gremolata and saffron risotto, a bistecca Fiorentina for two from dry-aged ribeye, a wild-boar pappardelle from October through February). The bread basket is a working stone-oven loaf the kitchen bakes through service, and the olive oil is the imported single-estate Tuscan extra-virgin that the room has used since opening.

The wine list is Italian-only — about 220 references with a deep Tuscan bench (six Brunelli, twelve Chianti Classico Riservas, four Super Tuscans), a strong Piemonte section, and a working Veneto and Friuli wine-by-the-glass programme. Service is the unhurried Italian-restaurant pace: long pauses between courses, a captain who walks the wine list without rushing the choice, a complimentary house grappa or limoncello at the end of every dinner. For the Springfield birthday table of six to twelve, the family Saturday-night dinner, or the closing-of-the-deal Italian evening, Avanzare is the South-side first answer.