Fort Lauderdale icon Nick’s Italian Restaurant permanently closes, and Café Vico rushes in
Two Fort Lauderdale Italian restaurant icons are becoming one. Nick’s Italian Restaurant, a beloved beachside trattoria and old-school supper club in Galt Ocean Mile since 1974, abruptly shut down after dinner service on May 31.
Less than 12 hours after Nick’s Italian closed its doors, Café Vico chef-owner Marco Vico Rodrigues flung them open again. He’s racing to open a second edition of his high-end Italian favorite on Friday, June 4.
On Tuesday morning, Rodrigues began repainting walls, cleaning floors, removing booths. On Wednesday, he hung black-and-white photos of Tuscany and New York and put a grand piano upstairs, the site of Café Vico’s future piano bar. The whiplash of new ownership has been so sudden, he says, the glowing signs of Nick’s Italian Restaurant will still be hanging outside, facing A1A, greeting customers for Café Vico’s first dinner service at 4 p.m.
“I haven’t had time to take Nick’s signs down yet,” a near-breathless Rodrigues told the Sun Sentinel Thursday morning. “We’re trying to open right away. I’m 10 hours a day there decorating and cleaning. The transformation will happen along the way.”
Why the rush? Rodrigues says his 25-year-old restaurant’s original location at 1125 N. Federal Highway is facing an existential crisis, so he purchased the two-story Nick’s Italian building last weekend from longtime owner Dominic Santarelli. Neither disclosed the sale price but the Nick’s Italian building is valued at $1.23 million, according to property records.
For Santarelli, whose grandmother Maria debuted Nick’s Italian on A1A 47 years ago, the decision to sell came down to waning passion, months of pandemic-fueled staff shortages and his 35-year-old son, Dominic, who “didn’t have the passion” to inherit the family-run restaurant, he says.
“The building wasn’t even for sale – I wanted to hold onto it and lease,” Santarelli explains. “And then my agent tells me Café Vico wants to buy it, and I said, ‘Bar none, that’s me and my wife’s favorite high-end Italian restaurant.’ So Marco and I talked and I felt like he was my long-lost brother.”
“Nick’s has been there since 1974, and I didn’t want anyone to tarnish the name,” he says. “But if I had to sell, I’m glad it was to Marco.”
For Rodrigues, investing in Nick’s Italian was a way to future-proof the legacy of Café Vico, which began its life on North Federal Highway in 1997 as a 26-seat storefront, until it grew into a cavernous, 7,000-square-foot space with white tablecloths, candles and a ceiling fresco of floating, bright-blue clouds. (A short-lived sister location opened in downtown Fort Lauderdale in 2004 but closed the same year.)
While he runs Café Vico’s second location in Galt Ocean Mile, Rodrigues’ original restaurant will stay open at least through 2023, when his current lease expires.
What concerns him is a future project from Miami Beach-based Elysee Investments, which bought Café Vico’s shopping plaza for $15.8 million in 2019. Redevelopment plans are underway to morph PMG Plaza into a pair of 12-story and 15-story apartment towers connected by a sky-bridge, with ground-floor storefronts and rooftop pools. The city has yet to green-light it, and the project is winding its way through Fort Lauderdale’s Development Review Committee board.
“It’s nowhere close to breaking ground,” says Jason Crush, the Fort Lauderdale-based attorney for Elysee Investments, of the apartment tower project. “But our clients did speak with Marco and said they’d love to have him as a tenant when it’s finished.”
Rodrigues wasn’t willing to wait, and he’s concerned the apartment towers could jeopardize Café Vico’s first home. “I know they’re going to rebuild that plaza sometime, and I just wanted to get ahead of the game,” says the Brazilian-born chef. “You never know what problems will happen, and I didn’t want to be trapped. But I’ll keep a second location there if they let me.”
Rodrigues considers Galt Ocean Mile a “very promising area” with more beach tourism than his Federal Highway location, and April’s opening of Patrizia’s of New York two blocks south shows him that New York operators are betting big on the condo-heavy neighborhood.
Some of Nick’s Italian’s DNA will be preserved. Café Vico doesn’t sell pizza, but Rodrigues hired a pizzamaker, his retired brother-in-law, who operated Nino’s Pizzeria in New York for 30 years. The rest of the menu will be identical to the first Café Vico: hand-made pasta, seafood ravioli, eggplant rollatini, veal chops and lasagna Bolognese.
The upstairs supper club at Nick’s Italian, where lounge singers like Jimmy Cavallo and Tony Chance once crooned, and where celebrities Robert De Niro, Adam Sandler and Frank Sinatra Jr., once dined, will become a piano bar.
“Marco is like a Gordon Ramsey, you know?” Santarelli says. “He told me the thing he loves most in life is the restaurant business, and seeing the people love the food. It was like staring into a mirror.”
Café Vico (formerly Nick’s Italian Restaurant) at 3496 Ocean Drive, in Fort Lauderdale, will reopen for dinner service at 4 p.m. Friday, June 4. Call 954-563-6441.
