D’Amico and Sons, the company that grew from a single fine dining Italian restaurant to a sprawling portfolio across both the Twin Cities and Naples, Florida, will close its two remaining Minnesota locations in Edina and Golden Valley at the end of March. Brothers Richard and Larry D’Amico, who founded the company in 1982, are shifting their focus to their Naples restaurants—Campiello, The Club Room at Campiello, and The Continental—while their longtime partner Paul Smith will carry on D’Amico Hospitality’s catering operations in the Twin Cities, continuing to expand to new venues.
You need a long view of the Twin Cities’ food scene to fully appreciate how D’Amico and Sons has shaped the dining world we know today. The D’Amico family emigrated from Abruzzo, Italy to West Virginia, where they worked in the coal mines until their first-born son Arthur D’Amico, Richard and Larry’s father, moved north to Cleveland. There, he married their mother Helen and opened a restaurant, D’Amico’s Candlelight Inn. Richard and Larry, who grew up working at the Inn, eventually left Ohio for Minneapolis, where they launched a consulting business. After a few strike-outs, they took over the French restaurant La Tortue to great success. The Star Tribune gave it a four-star review; business bloomed; and the brothers eventually took over the space and turned it into D’Amico Cucina, their namesake fine dining Italian restaurant.
Many of the chefs who came to define 21st-century Twin Cities dining—from Doug Flicker and Tim McKee to Joan Ida and Isaac Becker—trained at D’Amico Cucina, and Richard and Larry went on to open sister fine dining restaurants Azur and Masa. “[D’Amico and Sons] was the preeminent restaurant company in the Twin Cities,” Andrew Zimmern told Twin Cities Business in a 2021 profile on the brothers. “Richard and Larry’s culinary family tree is the fullest and bore the most fruit. They defined an era and teed up a team of culinarians that created the food scene in the Twin Cities. Without Cucina and Azur and later Masa, you don’t have Alma or Spoon and Stable.”
The D’Amico story since those early days is one of ballooning expansion—to Uptown, where they opened their first D’Amico and Sons cafe in 1994; to booming suburban locations; to Naples, where their parents had retired; to success in the catering business—and then a slow, steady wind-down of their brick-and-mortar restaurants over the years. D’Amico Cucina closed in 2009, and other metro locations followed. After Eden Prairie’s Campiello closed in 2023 and Café and Bar Lurcat closed in 2025, the Golden Valley and Edina locations were the D’Amico brothers’ two remaining Minnesota outposts. It’s no exaggeration to say their closure marks an end of an era, but the D’Amico imprint will never quite fade from the Cities’ food scene. Slip in for one last pasta dinner before the final day of service on March 28.
February 26, 2026
11:37 AM
Dining and Cooking