A brand that spent two decades saying no to expansion has just said yes to an island that says no to almost everything.
Casa Tua — the Miami Beach restaurant, hotel and private club that Miky Grendene and Leticia Herrera-Grendene opened in 2001, and that has since added outposts only twice, in Aspen and New York — has made its first move outside the United States. The address is Hotel La Palma, Capri's oldest hotel, dating to 1822 and standing a hundred metres from the Piazzetta under the Oetker Collection flag since the group's renovation of the property.
The rollout has been gradual, in the house style: Casa Tua Restaurant opened April 16, Fuoco by Casa Tua on the rooftop followed May 15, Mare by Casa Tua, the beach club, opened May 21, and The Club at Casa Tua — the membership room that has always been the quiet engine of the brand in Miami and Aspen — is set to open by the end of summer. Four venues, phased in over a season, inside one address.
The timing is not incidental. 2026 is Casa Tua's twenty-fifth year, and the brand has treated the anniversary as licence for the one expansion it had resisted since Aspen in 2010: a move to Europe, and specifically to an island that has never needed anyone's brand to draw a crowd. "Capri is not a decision you make with your head," Grendene has said of the choice. "It's something you feel in your heart" — adding that the ambition is to be "the place where the island's past is reborn," a line that reads as a deliberate distancing from the beach-club spectacle that has otherwise defined recent Capri openings.
Whether a Miami import can hold that promise on an island this fluent in its own restraint is the question the season will answer. Da Paolino, Mammà and JK Place did not need American help to be the addresses people already fly in for. What Casa Tua is betting on is not novelty but familiarity of a specific kind — the same low-key clubbability, transposed from a Miami side street to a hotel that predates the Aspen outpost by a hundred and eighty-eight years.
— Camille
