Richard L. Nix Jr., president of the St. Louis-based catering company Butler’s Pantry Catering & Events, and his wife, Elizabeth, are opening an Italian pastry shop in The Loop. The shop, Piccione Pastry, will be located on the northeast corner of the intersection of Delmar and Skinker Boulevards.
Piccione (pronounced “pi-ch?-nee”) will offer single-serve Italian pastries as well as Italian coffees and sodas. Among the Piccione signature items future sweet-toothed patrons can expect are eight varieties of cannoli, bombolini made to order, numerous types of Italian cookies, tiramisu, ricotta cheesecake, cassata cake (a liqueur- or juice-soaked sponge cake layered with ricotta, candied fruit and/or chocolate and topped with marzipan and whipped cream), and other specialty cakes.
At the culinary helm of Piccione will be Martin Lopez, who has worked as executive pastry chef at Butler’s Pantry for the past six months. Lopez, a career chef, is a 1987 graduate of the New England Culinary Institute and former owner of Chantilly Cake Co., which he opened in Alton, Ill., in the mid-1990s. Lopez explained that while his pastries will be recognizably Italian in form, he plans to put his own spin on things. (After all, he’s the son of an Italian mother who fused her native cuisine with Mexican flavors when she married her Mexican husband and moved to Mexico City, where Lopez was born.)
Richard Nix explained that his pastry project has been in the works for the last two years. The Italian word Piccione, meaning “pigeon,” is also the last name of his Italian grandmother, Grace Piccione, who once operated the now-defunct Varsity Theatre in The Loop. “We kind of have a family history on Delmar,” Richard Nix said. He’s optimistic that Piccione’s location at the busy corner of Delmar and Skinker Boulevards will attract customers. “It’s like being at the corner of Main [Street] and Main [Street],” he explained. Since the shop will stay open until 11 p.m. – and later on weekends – he also hopes to draw some of The Loop’s nightlife crowd, even without a liquor license.
Activity inside the empty space at 6197 Delmar Blvd., which was most recently occupied by a barbershop, will begin in December. The target opening date for the 40-seat shop is March 1, 2013, upon the addition of a kitchen and interior design, the latter tasked to Elizabeth Nix and designer Mark Herman of Mark, Inc. (Herman also worked on Butler’s Pantry venues including Palladium Saint Louis near Lafayette Square and Bixby’s inside the Missouri History Museum.) “It won’t look like a traditional pastry shop,” Richard Nix said. “You have to keep it in the neighborhood; the neighborhood is so edgy.”
— Photo courtesy of Richard L. Nix Jr.
This article appears in October 2012.