Chef brothers have an opening date, menu for their new FioRito Ristorante in College Hill
It’s been just over three months since brothers Jason and Jordan Rickard announced their plans to open a new Italian restaurant in the former Two Brothers BBQ and Burger Grill space at 3134 E. Douglas.
Now, the Rickards are almost ready to open the restaurant, which they’re calling FioRito Ristorante. Opening day is Tuesday, May 10.
This week, the brothers gave a tour of their new space and shared the menus for FioRito, which will serve lunch, dinner, desserts and house-made cocktails. Eventually, it will also offer weekend brunch.
The brothers describe the restaurant as “Italian-ish,” meaning that the dishes are all inspired by the flavors of Italy. But the Rickards, who aren’t Italian but are both creative chefs, say they’re not aiming for what some may describe as “authentic” Italian dishes.
“Many places really put an emphasis on Italian, even if the owners don’t speak Italian,” Jordan said. “We’re way less interested in if it’s authentic than if it’s delicious.”
FioRito’s dinner menu includes four sections: bread service, shared plates, pasta and shared entrees.
Those who order bread service will get slices of fresh sourdough bread made by Jason and served with a choice of three to five spreads. Among the spread choices: pimento cheese, cannellini bean hummus, charred eggplant dip, green chili ricotta, and stracciatella, which is a soft and creamy Italian cheese.
The shared-plate section includes choices like roasted cauliflower, chicken fried mushrooms, pork meatballs served with red sauce and stracciatella, and a couple of salads.
The pasta menu offers a chicken fettuccine Alfredo; a French-onion radiatore topped with gruyere cheese, caramelized onions, bites of local mushrooms and toasted croutons; and a rigatoni with pork ragu, jalapeno, stracciatella, pumpkin seeds and cilantro. The Rickards will make all of their pastas fresh, and they’ll put a special emphasis on homemade stuffed pastas, like the pepperoni-ricotta ravioli that’s also on the menu.
Two mainstay entrees will be a black cod and a beef osso buco, though the chefs will rotate in specials like rib eye prepared table side and other fish dishes.
At lunch, the bread section will be replaced by a list of house-made sandwiches, including a meatball sandwich, and the pasta and shared-plate offerings will be fewer. The idea is to get people in and out quickly over the lunch hour, the brothers said.
Desserts will be homemade and include basil panna cotta, malted milk cake and pineapple olive oil cake. Wine will be available by the glass or bottle, and the bar will also offer craft cocktails and beer. A kids menu also will be available, as will gluten-free, vegan and vegetarian options.
The brothers say they designed the menu so that customers who come hungry will leave satisfied. The pasta dishes are big, they said, and are intended to feed one very big appetite or two average appetites. Shared plates will also be big enough to share: One of the brothers’ shared pet peeves is shared-plate restaurants whose dishes don’t include enough food to go around the table.
“We’d love for you to come in with a four-top and get bread with five dips, pick out two or three shared plates, pick out a couple of pastas and maybe do a shared entree if you want,” Jason said.
They’re still finalizing pricing, but Jason said that bread service will likely be between $12 and $14 and feed two to four. Shared plates will all be under $20. Pastas will likely start at $16 and top out at $28 for the more labor-intensive stuffed pastas. Entrees will be in the $30s or low $40s.
The restaurant’s website, fioritoristorante.com, will be up soon and will allow people to make reservations or order online.
Two brothers, both chefs
The brothers have transformed the old Two Brothers space, which originally was built as a service station. Inside, they’ve painted, added a few flower murals and put in new flooring. They also added a small bar and seating inside for about 48.
One of the restaurant’s selling points, especially as summer approaches, will likely be its expansive patio area, the bulk of which is underneath the former gas station awning in front of the restaurant. The patio will offer seating for at least 50, much of it covered.
The Rickards invested in big pasta-making machines for their kitchen, including a sheeter and an extruder. Making pasta and bread and running the business side of the restaurant will be Jason’s forte, while Jordan will focus on the nightly execution of the food.
Owning a restaurant together has been one of the brothers’ long-held dreams, and it was an educational process to put one together so quickly, they said. But they like what they’ve created, and it has helped that they trust each other implicitly, they said.
“We like food. We like talking about food. We like bouncing ideas off of each other,” Jason said. “We both have enough ideas, and nobody takes it personally if you’re like, ‘Oh, I’d rather do this or do that.’”
The brothers, who grew up in Wichita and graduated from East High School’s International Baccalaureate program, have extensive restaurant resumes.
Jordan helped Jeremy Wade open his Napoli Italian Eatery but late last year left his job there as executive chef to focus on FioRito. He also worked at Greystone Restaurant in Wichita, and before that cooked his way across Denver at restaurants like Beat & Bottle, Frasca Food and Wine, and Linger. He’s also a culinary arts graduate of Johnson and Wales University in Denver.
Jason attended Northwestern University and earned a degree in political science. He was considering a career in law before he fell into cooking, too. The brothers worked together in Denver at Frasca, and Jason also had jobs at Denver restaurants like Beckon and Safta.
Both brothers found their way back to Wichita over the past several years. Jason returned first, helping Carlos Vera get Taco Locale off the ground. In 2020, he also worked as executive chef at YaYa’s Eurobistro. Jordan returned next, taking a job as executive chef at Greystone then moving on to Napoli.
“We tried to build a menu that leans on some of the strengths of things we’ve learned from other restaurants we’ve worked at,” Jason said. “The menu is short, but I stand behind everything here. We think that, within reason, any dish should be as good as any other dish because they’ll all have the same level of effort and scratch-made ingredients.”
Fiorito Ristorante menu
This story was originally published April 27, 2022 at 1:14 PM.
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