Caragiulos Reopened on Ringling Boulevard as a Dinner Room

"We were a meatball hero and Styrofoam cup kind of place when we first started," co-owner Paul Caragiulo told Sarasota Magazine in 2025, describing the restaurant his father Tony and his brothers John, Mark, Rob and Anthony opened at 69 S. Palm Ave. in 1989.

Over the next 36 years it became a downtown mainstay known for pizza, pasta, its house salad and a busy lunch hour full of regulars, according to the same story. The Caragiulos that opened to the public on Tuesday, Oct. 27, at 1833 Ringling Blvd. is built for a different part of the day. Its reservation page on Toast lists hours of 4 to 9 p.m., seven nights a week, and no lunch hours appear on it. Hours can change after opening week. As of now, though, the family has rebuilt downtown's lunch institution as a place for a night out, and every choice in the new room points the same way.

The room was designed before the menu

Paul Caragiulo has been unusually direct about the order of priorities. He has described the family as being in the venue business and only "incidentally" in the food business, as long as the food is done well, and he quotes the British chef Marco Pierre White to explain it, Sarasota Magazine reported:

"At the end of the day, atmosphere, service, food—in that order."

The building follows that rule. Javi Suárez of Suarez Architecture designed it, and the exterior is restrained, with a tall brick arch marking the entrance. The interior was conceived by Luciano Botta, a longtime family friend and founder of the Milan design firm Compagnia Pacifico. He told the magazine he tried to imagine how Caragiulos would have evolved from the 1980s to today.

So the room arrives looking aged on purpose. Textured glass globes hang at different heights. Vintage Italian film posters, portraits and paintings fill the walls in mismatched frames, alongside wood paneling, patterned surfaces, illuminated liquor displays and period table lamps. Venetian artisans made the Murano glass fixtures on commission, and the vintage furniture was restored and reupholstered in Italy before it shipped to Sarasota in a container. "It's like a Mastroianni movie from 1968," Paul told the magazine.

Sound got attention too. Anna Caragiulo, the 87-year-old family matriarch, made the room's 14.5-foot gold curtains. According to her son, they improve the acoustics for the vinyl he plays from behind the bar, a collection that includes Gianni Morandi and Domenico Modugno. A record collection and custom curtains make sense in a room you settle into for an evening. They do much less for a 45-minute weekday lunch.

What made the trip from Palm Avenue

A good deal of the old place is in the new one, though it has been reworked. The family saved the marble from the Palm Avenue bar, cut it into strips and set it into the new bar. The original Italian film posters and artwork came back as well. Many longtime employees are expected to return after working at the family's other restaurants during the closure, and family members will rotate through the dining room.

Set side by side, the two addresses look like this.

The menu that came with the move was posted online before opening, and it keeps the dishes regulars ordered for years: pasolini, the pasta with Gorgonzola cream and sun-dried tomatoes, at $23; meatballs at $21; the 37-layer lasagna at $25; chicken parmigiana at $32; and pizzette from $14 to $15.95.

The new dishes show where the restaurant is headed. They include My Mother's Pasta, rigatoni with fava bean purée, chicory, English peas and ricotta salata, at $23; halibut cacciucco with mussels and prawns at $43; spaghettini with Cedar Key clams at $26; handmade cappellacci with king crab, corn, polenta and pecorino butter at $37; a 20-ounce bone-in veal chop Milanese at $59; and the 40-ounce bone-in bistecca Fiorentina, served sliced with two sides, at $115. A $115 steak for the table belongs at dinner, and a room that seats 150 and closes at 9 p.m. tells you which meal it was planned around.

Why the old room is not coming back

The move to Ringling Boulevard was not the family's choice of timing. When demolition of the Mira Mar was proposed in 2022, Paul said the restaurant's lease ran through 2040. Property owner Dr. Mark Kauffmann sold the Mira Mar to Seaward Development for $17.3 million in 2023 while that lease was still in effect. Caragiulos closed on Palm Avenue in October 2025 with roughly 15 years left on the original lease, Sarasota Magazine reported. Kauffmann also owns the Ringling Boulevard property under the new building, so the landlord relationship carried over even though the address changed.

The old site is under construction for something else. The city issued the construction permit for Mira Mar Residences in April 2026. The plan restores the historic Mira Mar frontage along 400 feet of South Palm Avenue and adds two 18-story towers with 70 condominiums, Your Observer reported. SRQ Magazine covered the groundbreaking ceremony on South Palm Avenue on May 20, 2026. The first work focuses on rehabilitating and stabilizing the historic buildings, with completion expected by the end of 2028.

That means the Palm Avenue storefront where the lunch crowd ate is being restored as the face of a condominium project. The Caragiulos lunch hour had no room to move into, and the family built the restaurant it wanted on a new lot.

The same fall rearranged other long-running rooms

Caragiulos is the most visible case of something that happened across downtown this fall. Several long-running places closed, moved or changed form within about six weeks:

1. Mid-September: Chef and owner Steve Phelps announced that Indigenous had closed after 15 years, which the Herald-Tribune dated to Sept. 15. The closure post said the team was "ready for a change," according to Sarasota Magazine.
2. Mid-September: Artisan Cheese Company at 550 Central Ave. closed after 14.5 years, Your Observer reported.
3. Sept. 18: Alma de España chef and owner Elier Rodriguez told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune he planned to move the restaurant from 1830 S. Osprey Ave. in Southside Village into the Indigenous cottage at 239 S. Links Ave. The Herald-Tribune's photo gallery put the target at an early November reopening. Call ahead before you go.
4. Late September: Tastes of the Philippines opened at 1987 Ringling Blvd., a short walk up the same street from the new Caragiulos, per the Herald-Tribune.
5. Oct. 27: Caragiulos opened at 1833 Ringling Blvd.

In two of these cases, the Indigenous cottage and the Caragiulos name, a beloved downtown room carries on in a new form instead of disappearing. The cottage on Links Avenue gets a Spanish kitchen. The Caragiulos name gets a dining room tuned for evenings.

If the old Caragiulos was where you met people for lunch, the family still runs restaurants close by. Its own directory on caragiulos.com lists Owen's Fish Camp at 516 Burns Ct., with a second location at 6516 University Pkwy. in Lakewood Ranch, and Burns Mercantile at 530 Burns Lane. Reservations for Ringling Boulevard go through the restaurant's Toast page, and the phone number listed there is 941-951-0866.

The Caragiulos family cut the old bar's marble into strips and built it into the new one, which is the kind of salvage decision Michelle Ward's construction and design background is suited to. If you're weighing what in your own downtown place is worth keeping and what to redo before you sell, The Michelle Ward Group can help you sort it out, starting with an instant home valuation.