Is there any location in St. Louis where an Italian restaurant can’t sprout? Riccardo’s on Broadway pushes the limits of the possible nearly to the Mississippi River. A sequel to Ricardo’s Italian Cafe, which closed in 2015 after 26 years in Lafayette Square, the new Riccardo’s opened last July in the industrial Near North Riverfront neighborhood north of downtown.
When you park in the lot behind the restaurant’s building, you will double-check that you haven’t mistakenly abandoned your car in a scrapyard. You can’t see the river from this lot, but the thrum of traffic on Interstate 70 and the occasional rumble of a passing freight train approximates its turbid flow.
Riccardo’s on Broadway is located at 1432 North Broadway in the Near North Riverfront neighborhood.
You might know this address as the former home of the biker bar Shady Jack’s Saloon. You don’t need to own a Harley-Davidson T-shirt or even an actual Harley to guess that Riccardo’s has fit itself into a footprint never envisioned as a cozy neighborhood spot.
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A wide metal ramp leads from the parking lot to a gangway-slash-patio alongside the restaurant. The entrance brings you into the spacious bar area — so spacious that a dance floor-sized portion to your right as you enter is essentially empty. The dining room is equally expansive. The tables are divided between floor level and a slightly elevated platform, which prevents this room from feeling as cavernous as a banquet hall.
The dining room is warmly lighted at Riccardo’s on Broadway.
If Riccardo’s 2.0 hasn’t re-created the ambience of the original restaurant, it has drawn a direct line from Lafayette Square to North Broadway. (It has also corrected the spelling of its name, adding a second c to Riccardo.) Michelle Adams, the co-owner of Ricardo’s Italian Café, operates Riccardo’s with her husband, Rich Dunnavant. Mark Adams, Michelle’s ex-husband and co-owner of Ricardo’s Italian Cafe, helped to launch the new restaurant.
Tim Adams, Michelle and Mark’s son, is Riccardo’s chef and a co-owner. He has previously cooked at his parents’ restaurant, the late Cielo at the Four Seasons Hotel St. Louis and Gerard Craft’s Pastaria as well as the renowned Spiaggia in Chicago. I last encountered his work in 2019 at Il Palato, Michael del Pietro’s upscale Italian restaurant in Clayton, where Adams was the inaugural executive chef.
Adams hasn’t reinvented Riccardo’s familiar Italian fare, but his experience leads to smart touches throughout the menu. It can be as simple as much better bread, freshly baked in house daily, than you expect for the meatball and chicken Parmesan sandwiches. In the latter case, the bread’s golden-brown crust and gentle chew is especially welcome, supporting the glorious mess of chicken, sauce and gooey cheese.
The Shrimp Diavola is served with risotto at Riccardo’s.
Shrimp Diavola kindles tender shrimp with the pyrotechnics of a well-made arrabiata sauce, bright with dead-ripe tomato, punchy with chile heat. Yet I found myself equally compelled by the Parmesan risotto that accompanied the shrimp. This is a work of true craft: luxuriously creamy rather than a puddle of cheesy glop, each kernel of rice retaining its al-dente heart even as it yields.
The Chicken Marie’s silken white wine-lemon sauce is too elegant, its subtlety lost against the hard char of broiled chicken with broccoli and mushroom. Sometimes, straightforward is better, like the inarguable Tortellini Roberto, plump little doughnuts packed with a blend of chicken and pork bobbing in a cream sauce with peas and prosciutto.
Sometimes, though, straightforward is just straightforward, sloughed off as casually as Riccardo’s signature beef spiedini sheds its lightly breaded exterior. Riccardo’s fries up perfectly snackable appetizers — toasted ravioli, calamari, arancini — that you will struggle to differentiate from the many other examples around town. The boldest choice here might be serving that calamari with a Dijon-horseradish dipping sauce instead of marinara.
(Our server, maybe anticipating diner revolt or already battle-hardened to it, asked if we wanted marinara as well.)
Tim Adams is the chef at Riccardo’s on Broadway.
The restaurant’s pizza occupies a strange liminal space: above the usual standard of Italian restaurants that don’t specialize in pizza, not interesting enough in its own right to compel a visit. The crust, roughly New York thin, has developed enough structure to support its toppings while staying on the springy side of chewy, but it lacks fermented tang or other distinctive flavor.
Riccardo’s finds itself in a similar middle ground. Its legacy will draw old fans, and Adams knows how to make those fans’ favorite dishes feel timeless rather than thawed from a decade’s deep freeze. The question remains, though —one I would ask whether the new Riccardo’s had opened here, in an old biker bar by the industrial riverfront, or across the street from its original location. When Italian restaurants can and do open everywhere in St. Louis, what should bring you here instead?
Steven Pursley spent three years in Japan learning the intricacies of scratch-made ramen.
