Tre Ragazzi’s Italian Café closes Gadsden Mall location

Greg Bailey, The Gadsden Times
·2 min read

Tre Ragazzi’s Italian Café has apparently closed its last remaining location, at the Gadsden Mall.

Social media reports about the closure began circulating early Monday morning, citing employees who indicated they were notified at the end of the shift that the restaurant was shutting down.

The doors to the restaurant were locked at lunchtime Monday. A text message to the ownership hadn’t been returned as of midday.

Tre Ragazzi's Italian Café was located at the back corner of the Gadsden Mall, on the side where Sears once was an anchor store.
Tre Ragazzi's Italian Café was located at the back corner of the Gadsden Mall, on the side where Sears once was an anchor store.

The closure took place on the same day that another Italian restaurant opened nearby — Gadsden’s new Olive Garden.

Tre Ragazzi’s Glencoe location at 616 Banks St. closed in late March. Its Boaz location at 200 Elizabeth St. shut down in February for renovation work on the building, but hasn’t reopened.

The original Tre Regazzi’s — the name means “three boys” in Italian and reflects founders Kevin and Toni Napper’s sons Chad, Seth and Tyler — opened on Aug. 6, 2012, at 519 Broad St. in downtown Gadsden.

The Nappers owned Uncle Sam’s Pizza in East Gadsden from 1987 to 1994, and Kevin worked as a distributor of Italian food products.

Toni in a 2013 interview with Gadsden Style said they saw an opening for another local restaurant, especially one serving Italian cuisine. Its menu featuring an assortment of pasta and other Italian dishes and pizza, with imported ingredients including buffalo milk mozzarella, proved popular with area diners. It also had the area’s only brick pizza oven.

The Nappers opened the Glencoe location in 2017 (for several years, they had Tre’s Southern Café, a breakfast and lunch restaurant, nearby) and the Boaz location in 2021.

They relocated their main restaurant from downtown to the mall in the late summer of 2021, to a prime spot adjacent to The Alley, a bowling and recreation facility.

The Nappers said at the time that the mall location offered three times the seating (the old spot held only 66 diners) and more than three times the space (7,000 square feet inside and 2,500 outside, compared to 3,000) as the downtown site. The extra room also allowed them to expand their pizza ovens to nearly four times the previous capacity.

However, they also cited the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the distribution chain and prices for food and equipment, and the difficulty in attracting employees, plus the need to pay them more to retain them.

Still, in a story last month following the Glencoe closure, the Nappers expressed optimism about the future, noting that they’d added dishes to the menu and citing plans to have live music and cornhole games on the patio, and to place more tables outside to create the atmosphere of a true Italian café.

They also said they looked forward to the challenge from Olive Garden and would strive to “do the best we can at what we do,” and put out the best food possible.

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Tre Ragazzi's closes Gadsden Mall location