This red sauce restaurant served suburban Miami for nearly 50 years. Now it’s closing
Nunzio’s Ristorante was more than a traditional red sauce joint, serving simple Italian-American classics for nearly 50 years to Miami’s western bedroom communities.
The strip mall restaurant was a dream for a struggling immigrant family. Nunzio Auricchio left behind a threadbare life in the tiny town of San Giuseppe Vesuviano, where he sold groceries out of the trunk of his car, to start a restaurant where his wife and five children could work and thrive.
It became a South Florida classic. Serving mammoth family-style portions of baked ziti, cannelloni, Parmigianas — with a couple of improvised dishes named after mama and papa — Nunzio’s was a perfect midweek stop for tired families and quiet special occasions.
But after 48 years, the last remaining of those children working at the restaurant will close it for good. The restaurant will not renew its lease when it ends March 27.
“I want to carry with me the memories of this place, but not the burden,” said current owner Roberto Auricchio, 60, Nunzio’s second-youngest son.
The oil crisis of the 1970s squeezed the Auricchio family. Nunzio’s wife, Gilda, asked her sister who owned a classic Brooklyn red sauce restaurant, Mario’s, if she could sponsor her family and help them get into the restaurant business in America.
The Auricchios from Italy and Gilda’s relatives from New York moved to Miami, where they opened a restaurant together. It was first called Mario’s until Nunzio bought it out two years later and renamed it after himself.
In that 30-seat restaurant his two daughters and three sons all played a role (when they were old enough). Nunzio and Gilda, who had learned the recipes from her aunt and uncle, reproduced them faithfully at a strip mall on the corner of Coral Way and Southwest 97th Avenue until 1986, when a mall fire damaged their restaurant.
They were out of business for a year — but when they re-opened in the current location, at 11433 SW 40th St., it was packed with faithful diners.
“(Diners) feel this is a second home when they come here with their families,” Roberto said. “It’s a friendly, family place where they can share memories.”
Sisters Erminia and Maria-Nunzia returned to Italy to marry. But the brothers, Biagio, Roberto and Francesco, continued to run it with their parents.
That is until Gilda died in 2015. Brokenhearted, Nunzio died a year later. Biagio, who moonlighted there as a waiter while also teaching Italian and French at Miami Dade College, retired and Roberto kept up the daily operations for the last few years.
But with no children, nieces or nephews interested in taking up the family business, Roberto decided to let the restaurant go.
“I don’t want the Nunzio’s name stained if somebody else took it over and ruined,” he said.
Roberto and his staff have spent the last few weeks saying goodbye to diners. Longtime server Marcela Tondi, an Argentina native, says she gets “a knot in my throat” when she thinks about the end of Nunzio’s. “Every day, we’re saying goodbye,” she said.
Don’t mourn the little restaurant, Roberto says. For nearly 50 years, it kept alive a family and its dream.
“I finished what I promised myself I was going to do,” Roberto said. “And now it’s time to move on.”
This story was originally published March 17, 2022 at 7:04 AM.
