Dimo’s Expands Orbit with Grandeur, Gestalt, and Gooey Cheese

The space on Burnside that was once home to Burnside Brewing (a touchstone of East Burnside’s beer boom in the 2010s) more recently served as the production facility for Fracture Brewing. In summer 2025, it looks quite different. Though the oversized, black grain silo still towers over the parking lot outside, the brew tanks and all the hoses within are long gone, and that tall tower now bears small white letters that spell “Dimo’s.”

Inside, there’s a full bar, a bakery display case stocked with breads, pizza, and pastries, a small market nook with dry and refrigerated goods ranging from wines to salts, and a spacious dining room with no shortage of chairs, benches, and tables.

Dimo’s Italian Specialties opened its doors on East Burnside Street officially on July 6. But here’s the rub: owner Doug Miriello didn’t need another restaurant. The Connecticut boy who cut his teeth cooking in Los Angeles at Gjelina and Gjusta before settling into Portland had a full plate already: successful New Haven-style pizza shop Dimo’s Apizza next door and two kids at home under six. But something about the space — and the opportunity to do more, in one place — struck him when Fracture ceased operations in 2024.

“I want this to be my home,” he says. “I don’t want to do anything else. I want this to be it.”

When the reservation-only supper club gets into full swing, the kitchen shifts from high-end Italian bar menu to full dinner service. Four pastas, including gnocchi dressed in lamb-tomato ragu and lasagna verde Bolognese composed of veal, pork, beef, and house-cured salumi will rotate through the lineup. Whole branzino and pollo al mattone are also on the table as options for these limited menus, and Dimo’s Italian Specialities expects to complete two dinner services on those evenings. The cocktails fit the format as well: the caprese martini, for example, angles at antipasto. It’s built on burrata whey, tomato water, and micro-basil clippings plucked from the kitchen’s prep station.

So he decided to make this new Dimo’s work. Remaking the former brewspace into a full restaurant, bar, bakery, deli market, plus a thrice-weekly supper club was no modest mission. But Miriello isn’t interested in dwelling on the challenges and difficulties he faced in the nine months of construction and remodeling. “It wasn’t easy to get where we are now, that’s for sure,” he explains.

Miriello’s newest business model may sound multi-faceted, even scattershot: a multi-use space that flips from sandwich counter to cocktail bar to romantic dinner venue, from cocktail bar to boutique grocer. It sounds like the sort of thing enthusiastic young business partners might conjure. Yet each slice of it — whether focaccia or sicilian square — draws from a subject in focus: a former kitchen, a childhood memory, a family recipe. If those stay clearly in view, the result could be a restaurant with a true gestalt.

“I want to be your… whatever you want us to be,” Miriello says. “I think you can come here and get a sandwich and then come back at night and have a drink, maybe a tartare, and just have a totally different experience.”

That experience may well hinge on the strength of Miriello’s team. General manager Herb Apon, previously of Loyal Legion, brings serious beer fluency, while assistant general manager Sarah Marshall “is just going to crush the floor with service,” Miriello boasts. “She’s just a superstar all around.” Zena Smith, formerly of Fracture and now-closed Cache Cache, helms the cocktail menu. Miriello says, noting Smith’s contributions as part of a larger beverage scope.

Smith’s previous stints at Fracture Brewing and Cache Cache have indeed instilled in her both a mixologist’s meticulousness and a cook’s curiosity. She explains that she hadn’t intended to be a full time bartender, having previously worked as a mechanic among other vocations. She’s spent the past several months “playing with the flavors of Italy and the flavors of Doug’s food,” sourcing and sampling amaros, bringing them to the forefront. Instead of putting the amaros to the side and adding little things into every cocktail as an element, she wanted to focus on the digestif’s punchy bitterness, layered complexity, and unmistakably Italian profile, making it the main piece of almost all the cocktails on the menu.

Of that burrata whey addition, she remarks, “I used a little bit of that for that briny saltiness, that lactic acid flavor… almost like zero waste.” Even her sbagliato corretto — a Negroni that sees its gin subbed out for sparkling wine — draws from “King Cocktail” Dale DeGroff, the famed bartender commonly credited with ushering in the modern craft cocktail revival. His influence is apparent, as Smith is herself enamored with the details of every measure as she pierces each cocktail’s surface with a thin wheel of blood orange. Her espresso martini, one of the few cocktails sans amaro, serves as the obvious finale, evokes biscotti, conjuring the soft crunch of almond cookies dunked in morning coffee, reborn, instead, as a midnight indulgence.

For all its ambition, refinement, nostalgia, the Dimo’s menu still makes room for what Miriello knows Portland is always after. “The dirtbag stuff.”

The purest expression of which is undoubtedly the fonduta burger, a porcini rubbed patty halved and dunked in a warm and gooey fontina fundata. Pairing it with the cacio e pepe fries is a truly savvy play; they’re peppered, punchy, and perfect for dragging through molten fontina. For all its flourishes, the heart of the menu stays simple: comfort, flavor, and a wink of indulgence.

Dimo’s Italian Specialties (701 East Burnside Street) is open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.