Zucca restaurant opens at Hotel St. Michel in Coral Gables: PHOTOS

Da Silva Hospitality Group launched Zucca, a new restaurant in Coral Gables, on Friday.

More than 250 attended the grand opening, held at the restaurant in the Hotel St. Michel, including Coral Gables Mayor Jim Cason and commissioner and Realtor Jeannett Slesnick. The event featured a ribbon cutting, hors d’oeuvres and cocktails by the Cocktail Cartel.

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The 28-key boutique hotel, at 162 Alcazar Avenue, cost about $2 million to build in 1926, according to its website. It’s owned by South Florida auto magnate Alan Potamkin and Stuart Bornstein of Battlecreek Properties. They bought the property in 1979. La Crepe St. Michel opened in the ground floor retail space at that time, then the Restaurant St. Michel for 35 years. Before Zucca, it was Gaetano Ristorante.

The hotel is also north of Miracle Mile and Giralda Avenue, where the city of Coral Gables is in the midst of a $21 million streetscape improvement project aimed at widening sidewalks, replacing trees and streetlights, and substituting parallel parking spaces for the existing angled parking space on Miracle Mile. – Katherine Kallergis