Palio

Palio takes its name from the Palio di Siena, the bareback horse race run twice each summer around the Piazza del Campo, and the restaurant sits at 545 Michigan Street NE in Midtown, a short distance along the same corridor as The Friesian. The kitchen is built around an industrial gas-fired stone pizza oven producing large pizzas, and the rest of the menu runs through bolognese, carbonara, lasagna and a set of reinvented Italian classics. The detail that anchors the cooking is the in-house herb garden: herbs are cut fresh for service rather than bought dried, which is a small operational commitment that shows up across both the plates and the drinks.

The non-alcoholic list is the reason Palio appears here, and it is unusual on two counts. The first is simple depth — seven named zero-proof drinks is more than any other restaurant in this guide carries, and more than most cocktail bars manage. The second is the naming. Rather than filing them under a generic mocktail heading, Palio titles each after an Italian cultural figure: Buble, Di Nero, Rossellini, Sinatra, Bellucci, Alighieri and Michaelangelo, running from Dante through Michelangelo to Monica Bellucci and Robert De Niro. That choice does real work. A drink called Alighieri sits on the page as an equal of the wine list; a drink called "mocktail no. 3" does not, and a guest ordering it out loud in front of a table is making a different kind of announcement. It is the same principle that Pacific Standard applies by printing ABV on every drink — the menu design decides whether a non-drinker is choosing or conceding. Palio trades Monday through Saturday, 4pm to 10pm, and takes reservations through Resy; the fresh-herb garden means the specific builds shift with what is cut that week.