Don Michele Ristorant

Don Michele is a family-run Italian restaurant on Perth Road, a few minutes' walk west of the city centre on the busy artery linking Dundee to Invergowrie. The owners describe it as having started with five tables and grown from there, and the dining room still has the small-trattoria feel that the description implies — closely spaced tables, hand-written specials and a kitchen team turning out pizza, pasta, fish and meat dishes from a relatively wide but tightly cooked menu.

Reviews on TripAdvisor and the Visit Dundee listing consistently single out the freshness of the pasta and the unfussy, generous Italian-home-cooking style of the mains; the calzones and the seafood pasta dishes pick up the most repeat mentions. It draws a mixed crowd of west-end regulars, Ninewells staff and students from the nearby halls, and is one of the longer-established independent Italians left in the west end of the city — not a pizzeria chain or a deep-fried pizza chip shop, but a proper sit-down ristorante that also runs collection orders for those who want the same food at home. Service is described as warm and personal rather than slick, which has become the restaurant's signature in a strip otherwise dominated by takeaways.