campiellos piano player
Photography by Anna Nguyen

Fine Dining, Live Music: Southwest Florida's Best Musical Restaurants

From Barbatella’s intimate opera nights to Bellini’s jazz-fueled dinner service, these local restaurants serve world-class dining with a side of unforgettable performances.

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Music is a standard component of a restaurant’s ambience—soft jazz streaming through speakers, maybe a lone pianist playing by the bar. However, a rare few Southwest Florida restaurants recognize that live performance can transcend background fodder. The choice of instrument, staging and style has the ability to transform a dining experience, providing a transportive atmosphere and strengthening cultural ties. For these restaurants, dinner is even more of a multisensory spectacle. 

At Barbatella on Naples’ Third Street South, the haunting strains of a Puccini aria drift through the dining room, wafting over plates of short rib ravioli with black truffle cream and porcini mushrooms. Once a month, the restaurant hosts an opera night—theater reimagined as the sopranos and tenors descend from the grand stages they typically grace to weave among their audience. “That we do not have a stage makes the event a highly intimate experience that people normally do not experience in opera houses,” Dimitrios Settos, the restaurant’s marketing representative, says. 

To secure top talent for the sell-out suppers, Barbatella partners with Opera Naples co-founder Livio Ferrari. While diners tuck into fresh pastas and other classic Italian fare, Livio (a seasoned tenor himself ) and guest performers hit their high notes, spanning operatic styles from Monteverdi’s baroque brilliance to Andrea Bocelli’s contemporary hits. “A culinary experience automatically provides a cultural experience as well,” Dimitrios says. “Opera has a deep-rooted heritage in Italy, much like the flavors and techniques that define the cuisine. On these special evenings, the synergy between food and music brings our guests closer to Italy.”

Bodega Olé in the Naples Design District similarly turns to music to bolster a sense of cultural identity. The restaurant is one of the few in Naples to serve traditional Spanish tapas, like Serrano ham croquettes, blood sausage and wine-infused figs. On Saturdays, live guitar adds to the Iberian cachet, its romantic timber acting as an acoustic trompe l’oeil to trick your sangria-soaked self into believing you’re in Madrid or Murcia, rather than Southwest Florida. 

Monthly flamenco nights turn the vibe electric. The whip of skirts and rhythmic stomps of dancers’ heels create a fiery, dramatic duet. As the percussion crescendos, the energy in the room feels alive, surging and ebbing with the tempo. The boundary between artist and audience dissolves, making each performance feel personal. “

As long as I’m in business, I’ll always support live music in my restaurants,” Andrea Mucciga, owner of Bellini’s in South Fort Myers, says. “There’s live music in bars, [but the] supper clubs like they used to do in the ’60s don’t exist very much anymore.” The original Bellini’s opened on Captiva in 1988, becoming a beloved island fixture for its Northern Italian cuisine and live music seven nights a week. The restaurant closed in 2001, and a series of equally music-forward Sanibel eateries followed, including The Riviera, Dolce Vita and Traditions on the Beach.

When Andrea revived Bellini’s on the mainland last summer, daily live music was essential to recreating the original’s spark. “It’s not just eat, get the check and go,” Andrea says. “Customers can spend a few hours here in the evening.” Regulars plan their reservations around the performers, with top billing going to local talent who have been on Andrea’s circuit for decades, like pianist and jazz festival fixture Danny Sinoff and fellow pianist Dean Winkelmann, who toured as part of an opening duo for Three Dog Night, The Byrds and former The Tonight Show bandleader Doc Severinsen. After old fashioneds, chilled shrimp cocktails and rich dishes like center-cut filet mignon in a pool of demi-glace or seafood Wellington with lobster-brandy sauce, Bellini’s often witnesses a phenomenon that’s rarely seen in modern restaurants: Diners turn the lively bar area into a spontaneous dance floor, some swaying to the music, others doing the two-step, hands clasped, to a classic American standard. 

For some restaurateurs, the allure of music, food and drink is so strong they’ve built entire concepts around it. At Naples’ Bellasera Hotel, The London Club is an ode to sultry, metropolitan jazz lounges. Two nightly seatings rotate among a robust roster of jazz artists, including up-and-comer Decyo McDuffie, Florida Gulf Coast University jazz instructor Brandon Robertson, pianist and recording artist Scott Earl Holman, and award-winning vocalist and trumpeter Chris Santiago. On weekends, the dimly lit room is a whir of ice-cold martinis and silver seafood towers, whisked upstairs from the hotel’s seafood restaurant, The Claw Bar. The space was designed to amplify the acoustics, with a velvet-draped stage at one end and a mix of private, high-backed booths and front-and-center tables for immersing oneself in jazz’s rollercoaster sound. 

Naples’ The Club Room is another purpose-built restaurant-meets-jazz club. Campiello imbued this adjacent, intimate music space with a sense of bygone glamour, coating the walls in Venetian plaster, laying down black-and-white checkerboard flooring, outfitting tables with deep leather seating and adding a stage backlit by Champagne-inspired bubble lights. “The Club Room was designed to transport you to another echelon of dining. You feel like you could be at a supper club in Soho or Paris—the audio cues are every bit as important as the visual ones,” general manager Beau Harris says. “Jazz and dining evoke a time before cell phones interrupted table conversations, when we dressed up for dinner out.” 

The menu draws from Campiello classics, but with added indulgences, including a retro drink cart stocked with after-dinner spirits (aged whiskies, syrupy port and bitter digestifs) and a new Valrhona chocolate service. But the centerpiece is musician-in-residence Benny Weinbeck. A world-traveled composer, jazz pianist and producer, he takes the stage most nights, effortlessly arranging a variety of styles from early jazz to swing, often with added star power from fellow Southwest Florida musicians, such as torch singer Vanessa Trouble and bassist Michael Ross. “Naples is blessed with a wide variety of quality dining experiences,” Beau says. “But some nights call for more than great food—an experience that nourishes your soul as much as your palate.”