On our recent trip to North Carolina, we flew in and out of Charlotte. On the night before we flew out to go back home, we stayed at a hotel not far from the airport. Looking for someplace to eat, the people at the front desk were absolutely no help, so we turned to our GPS that hadn't failed us so far on our trip when we were looking for some place to eat. We found a pizza place that we started out for, but then my wife found a place on her smart phone that sounded pretty interesting. It was an Italian restaurant called Mama Ricotta's that had pizza cooked in a brick oven. We were hankering for a pizza so we changed directions on the GPS and ended up at Mama Ricotta's.
Frank Scibelli grew up in a traditional Italian family in Springfield, MA. Dinners were always a festive occasion and young Frank loved the way the dinner table drew the family together for conversation and good times. After he graduated from Wake Forest with a business degree, he found himself doing consultant work in Charlotte. But his passion for food was too much to overcome. He opened Mama Ricotta's in 1992 and worked as the chef/owner for a number of years. Many of the recipes he used in the restaurant were handed down from family members.
Pictured right - Frank Scibelli. Photo courtesy of Restaurant Business Magazine.
Business at Mama Ricotta's grew quickly in a city where there weren't a lot of traditional Italian restaurants. Mama Ricotta's has expanded four times in the 25 years they've been in business. (And they were expanding their outdoor patio area when we were there earlier this year.)
In addition to Mama Ricotta's, Scibelli has opened a number of other restaurants around the Charlotte area and beyond. His Big Daddy's Burger Bar concept that opened in 2007 now has 24 company and franchise-owned locations in the Carolinas, Colorado and Oklahoma. He then opened a couple of Mexican places - Cantina 1511 (which he sold a couple three years ago) and Pacos Tacos in Charlotte not long after that. He opened his first barbecue place - Midwood Smokehouse - in 2012 and now has three locations in Charlotte (a fourth is scheduled to open later this year) and in Columbia, S.C. And in 2016, Scibelli opened Yafo Kitchen which features a Middle Eastern variety of food, and a second Charlotte location will open later this year. (Scibelli also partnered with chef Clark Barlowe to open Heirloom, a popular farm-to-fork restaurant in Charlotte.)
We found Mama Ricotta's on the far end of the King's Pointe strip mall along King's Drive in the Myers Park neighborhood just south of downtown Charlotte. (see map) It was about a 15 minute drive from our hotel, but we didn't mind. We had never been to Charlotte before and we wanted to check out the city a little bit. Because of the construction around the front of the building, we had to park in back of the restaurant. It was a pretty nondescript building that housed Mama Ricotta's, but I guessed that they were changing the outer facade on the building as part of their renovation.
We were able to get right in and were shown to a table in the dining area. Even though it had a number of light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, the light was subdued. I really had to crank down the aperture on the camera on my smart phone to make the room appear bright for this picture. We were given dinner menus to look through for the time being.
There was a small wall that delineated the dining area from the rest of the restaurant. The wall was paneled with slats of wood cases of wine. Most of the wines were from Italy and I thought it was sort of a neat touch to the decor of the Italian restaurant.
There was a small bar area off to the side of the restaurant. It featured a curved bar and some lounge style tables and chairs near the bar. It looked like a comfy little area to hang in if you had to wait for a table to open up.
Near the bar was a brick wood-fired oven and a prep area that was used to make the pizza at Mama Ricotta's.
There was a curved bar area for people to sit at. Not a lot of people were having pizza that night.
As we were looking over the menu, our server for the evening - Anthony, a personable young guy who was efficient with his service during our visit - came over to greet us. Asking if we'd ever dined at Mama Ricotta's before - a question we found to be the norm at most restaurants we ate at while we were in North Carolina - we told him we were from out of town and just in for one evening. "Well, you picked the best Italian restaurant in Charlotte," he told us. "People have been coming here for 20, 25 years. The Italian food is, by far, the best in town."
He did a good job of selling their regular Italian fare, but we were hungry for pizza considering we started out for a pizza restaurant to begin with. However, the menu at Mama Ricotta's had a number of Italian specialties available. They had a rigatoni that came with a ground beef/pork/veal meat sauce that immediately got my attention. The angel hair pasta with a tomato/basil sauce also sounded good, as did the Pollo alla Griglia entree consisting of a grilled chicken breast that had been marinated in lemon and garlic, then topped with bruschetta tomatoes and served with a side of garlic mashed potatoes.
My wife needed some greens to start out and she got a small Mama's salad that was made with fresh romaine lettuce, shaved carrots, red onion slices, olives, and pepperoncinis, along with chopped artichoke hearts, chopped roasted red peppers, and cherry tomatoes. All of the salad dressings served at Mama Ricotta's are housemade and my wife got the vinaigrette to go with the salad. There was a lot of stuff going on with the salad and she encouraged me to help her eat it. Everything was fresh and flavorful in the salad.
Along with the salad, they brought out a basket of fresh baked bread and a plate of olive oil with red pepper flakes. The bread was awesome and it was all I could do to not have any more than one roll as I didn't want to bulk up on bread with a pizza coming.
The pizza didn't take long thanks to the wood-fired oven and my wife and I were still piecing on her salad when Anthony showed up with the pizza. I was drinking a locally brewed IPA that they had on tap and my wife was doing a glass of chianti to go along with the pizza. It was a New Haven-style pizza with sort of a thin crust in the middle with a thicker outer crust. We got our usual sausage, pepperoni and mushroom pizza and the sausage had a nice somewhat-spicy taste to it. There seemed to be more sauce than cheese on it, and the crust - although it was thin - was more chewy than crisp. But it had a nice caramelization on top of the pizza that gave it a nice flavor. While it wasn't the best pizza we had, it was still very good.
Unless we find our way back to Charlotte for more than just one night, this will probably be our only visit to Mama Ricotta's. And we were happy that we found the place. The pizza was good - not as good as some places we like to go to in Chicago - but it filled the bill for us that night. I'm sure their Italian dishes are good, as well. You don't stay in business for 25 years if the food isn't good. The service we received from Anthony was top-notch, and the atmosphere was laid-back and comfortable. If you find yourself in Charlotte and looking for Italian food, I recommend you try Mama Ricotta's.
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