A new Italian restaurant will open at Waterside Place in late July. Giuseppe Del Sole, the owner of Napulè, has teamed up with his friend Carmine Ussano and two other business partners to conceptualize a new restaurant called Osteria 500.

“Osteria 500 takes its name from our love for one of the main symbols of Italy, the Fiat 500,” says Ussano.

The restaurant space spans nearly 8,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor dining which will include 160 seats for patrons to experience the Southern Italian-focused menu.

“The menu here will be very authentic, with 100 percent of our menu coming from Italian recipes," Ussano says. "The wine list will also focus primarily on Italian wine varietals, including those that many people have never heard of."

Osteria 500 will feature two distinct menus in the evenings, as well as a lunch menu during the day. The main dining room dinner menu will offer more robust dishes, like fettuccine with veal ragu and porcini mushrooms, various pizzas and an assortment of meat options made on the restaurant's custom charcoal grill. The lounge menu is lighter, with antipasti, pizza, bruschetta and assorted meats and cheeses to accompany your wine while you relax either at the 14-seat bar or near the outdoor gas fire pit.

The expansive restaurant also showcases a 40-seat mezzanine that Ussano calls “cozy and romantic.” The ceiling is covered in silk foliage with hundreds, maybe thousands, of lemons dangling among the greenery. It feels as though you’ve stepped into a citrus grove. And while Ussano says the inspiration is from his hometown of Sorrento in Italy, it still feels like home, given Florida's relationship with all things citrus.

Ussano, Del Sole and their business partners were attracted to Waterside Place at its inception.

“I saw an article promoting this place before it was built, so I came out here when it was still just water and sand," Ussano says. "But the picture attracted me. I contacted the developers and when we talked to them, we saw they were as passionate as we are. We thought we might do a food truck at first, but we decided to open this location instead."

The outdoor dining area overlooks the lake that inspired the name Waterside Place. A vintage blue truck nestled in the corner has been outfitted to become a bar that will serve simple cocktails, wine and beer to patrons as they wait for a table or head to the lounge. And since the flexible rules at Waterside Place encourage guests to walk the streets with drinks in hand, guests can swing by to put their name on the list, snag a drink and explore the surrounding neighborhood.

Osteria 500 will be located at 1580 Lakefront Drive, #101, Sarasota. For more information, click here.