Denver lands an East Coast-style Italian red-sauce joint

With only a few remaining exceptions, Denver has lost most of its unapologetically old-school Italian restaurants. We’re talking about the kind of places where Dean Martin is playing on the speakers, the chicken parmesan is bigger than your face, and the waiters make you feel like a regular (even if you’ve never been before).

With the opening of Florence Supper Club, however, there is at least one more.

Located at 375 S. Pearl St. next door to the Candlelight Tavern, Florence Supper Club was created by chef Miles Odell, who opened Odell’s Bagel, 3200 Irving St., in 2024, and his general manager and beverage director Paul Lysek. (The pair also oversees Odell’s Thursday-Sunday dinner tasting menu concept, known as The Counter.)

But unlike Odell’s Japanese-inflected bagels and The Counter’s creative take on kaiseki, Florence is intentionally straightforward.

“We’re trying to pay our respects to the food that we grew up with,” said Odell, who is a New Jersey native, while Lysek, a co-owner in this venture, is originally from New York. “We didn’t want to veer far off from the classics. We just wanted to make them taste really good.”

The concise yet impactful menu heavily leans into comfort dishes like chicken parm and veal marsala (with the option to swap proteins, so you can also order veal parm or chicken marsala), meatballs, clams cassino, spicy rigatoni alla vodka, and house-made focaccia that uses the same sourdough starter as Odell’s bagels. For dessert, enjoy a cappuccino with a slice of the New York-style cheesecake, made using Lysek’s grandmother’s recipe, from whom the restaurant borrows its namesake.

“Florence’s kitchen was the heart of our family,” Lysek explained in a statement about the restaurant. “We wanted to bring that same feeling to Denver – a place that’s warm, a little nostalgic, and full of great food made with love.”

The dimly lit eatery brings the East Coast vibe to life with its red leather booths, red and white gingham tablecloths, deep burgundy walls, family photos and sports memorabilia. Tiffany-style chandeliers hang over the wooden bar as crooners like Martin and Frank Sinatra hum in the background.

Come spring, a patio will add roughly 20 more seats, with plans for happy hour specials and potentially live music.

The idea for Florence didn’t start as a full-fledged restaurant, though. Lysek originally launched the supper club as a pop-up in 2022, hosting intimate dinners in Denver at spots like ESP HiFi and Brasserie Brixton. When he moved to New Orleans, the concept went dormant until he moved back to Denver to work at Odell’s Bagel and The Counter.

“We started talking about it as we started working together,” Odell recalled. “We both became really excited about it again and decided that we wanted to launch it as a brick-and-mortar restaurant.”

“The reason it really spoke to me was that I grew up on the East Coast as well as in a large Italian community, and also grew up with the same style of food, so I knew it well. I’ve cooked it before and it was something that was comfortable and nostalgic,” he continued.

The “heart and soul” of the menu is the red sauce, according to Odell. They use Jersey tomatoes because, they claim, “they’re the best in the world,” and let them simmer for eight hours to bring out all their flavors. “We blind tested the Jersey tomatoes with pretty much every other kind of tomato and they just have this natural sweetness and richness that we were looking for in our sauce.”

Florence Supper Club also runs a daily market fish special, pulling from the same purveyors used at The Counter but reimagined through an Italian lens. Recent specials have included Japanese red snapper and Tasmanian ocean trout.