French-Italian Restaurant Riviera 89 Now Open in Nocatee Town Center

Nocatee has a new place to eat on Marketside Avenue. Riviera 89, a French-Italian restaurant billed as "Italian Kitchen with French Soul," held its grand opening Friday, Sept. 18, in the roughly 1,860-square-foot space inside Nocatee Town Center that Catullo's Italian left behind earlier this year.

The restaurant is at 100 Marketside Ave., Suite 305, and seats between 73 and 80 guests. It's open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday, with dinner service starting at 5 p.m. daily.

Riviera 89 is run by Anthony and Emeric Roy Perruccio, a married couple who relocated from Alsace, France, to open the restaurant. Anthony, 38, leads the kitchen. Emeric, 29, runs the front of the house. The two spent about three months scouting locations across Florida before settling on Nocatee, drawn by the number of families in the area and what they described as its easygoing, golf-cart lifestyle.

Back home, the couple operates Sous Un Ciel d'Italie ("Under an Italian Sky") in Riedisheim, near Mulhouse, close to the German and Swiss borders. Riviera 89 is their first restaurant in the United States, built as an American version of that concept.

What's on the menu

The menu leans on a build-your-own pasta bar, where diners choose their noodle and pair it with sauces like marinara, Alfredo, Bolognese or pesto. A signature dish combines house-made pistachio pesto with mortadella. Pinsa Romano and risotto round out the Italian side.

The French half of the menu includes quiche, croque monsieur and French onion soup. Special nights are expected to bring out heavier classics such as beef bourguignon and raclette. One dish the owners are carrying over from their French restaurant is the ciotola, a handmade pizza-dough bowl filled with pasta or salad that diners can eat once the meal inside is gone.

The full menu is posted at riviera89.com. The owners have asked customers for patience while their staff settles into a new kitchen and a new country.

Nocatee Town Center has seen steady turnover in its restaurant row over the past year, and Riviera 89's opening fills one of the more visible storefronts along Marketside Avenue. Whether the build-your-own pasta bar and the French plates side by side become a regular stop for Nocatee and Ponte Vedra families will likely become clear over the next few weekends, as the new staff works through its first full run of dinner service.

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