Pazzo Italiano

Pazzo Italiano is an Italian restaurant on North County Highway 393 in Santa Rosa Beach serving pasta and wood-fired dishes, the second location of a restaurant built by two partners with complementary backgrounds in Italian cooking and hospitality. Alfonso Di Bonito, an Italian native from Naples, started training in a bakery at age 14 and grew into an award-winning pizza chef before partnering with Levente Tischler, a Romanian entrepreneur who entered the restaurant industry at the same age and had long wanted to open a restaurant of his own. Together they built Pazzo Italiano around a wood-fired oven that serves as the centerpiece of the kitchen, using it as the exclusive cooking method for the restaurant’s pizzas rather than treating it as one option among several.

That wood-fired approach runs through how the restaurant describes its own food: a menu the owners say is “carefully pieced together” to deliver “sophisticated flavors with a touch of fun and some new crazy combinations,” language that fits a kitchen built on traditional Italian staples reworked with a few unexpected pairings. Beyond the wood-fired pizzas, Pazzo Italiano runs full lunch and dinner menus covering the pasta and wood-fired dishes the Santa Rosa Beach location is known for, along with a kids menu for family groups and a catering program for private parties, a service the restaurant promotes alongside its dine-in room decorated with classic Italian touches built around the oven itself.

The Santa Rosa Beach restaurant sits at 111 North County Highway 393, Suite 301, and keeps hours built around lunch and dinner service through the work week. Monday through Friday the kitchen runs from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., covering both meals in one continuous stretch, while Saturday service starts later at 4 p.m. and runs to 9 p.m., and the restaurant stays closed on Sunday. That schedule rewards planning ahead for anyone hoping for a Sunday dinner along 393, since Pazzo will not be an option that day, though the rest of the week leaves plenty of room for both a midday pasta lunch and an evening wood-fired pizza dinner.

Pazzo Italiano also operates a sister location in Destin, on Emerald Coast Parkway, giving the two partners a small footprint across this stretch of the Emerald Coast rather than a single restaurant. Both locations share the same wood-fired oven concept and the same partnership between Di Bonito’s Neapolitan pizza background and Tischler’s restaurant management experience, though the Santa Rosa Beach location runs its own hours and its own dining room on County Highway 393, separate from the Destin kitchen.

For visitors on 30A or along the 393 corridor looking for a wood-fired pizza and pasta option, Pazzo Italiano offers a restaurant built specifically around one cooking method rather than a generalist Italian menu, a decision that shapes everything from the décor built around the oven to the menu’s playful spin on Italian staples. Carryout and delivery are both available for anyone who would rather bring a wood-fired pizza back to a beach rental than eat in the dining room, rounding out a restaurant that covers dine-in, takeout, private events, and catering under one roof at (850) 213-4581.