The first thing you notice at BiCE is the blue—a deep cobalt, like the canals of Milan at twilight, distilled and brushed onto shell-colored walls and ivory upholstery. By the time you are led past the bar and into the main dining room, Naples feels a few thousand miles away. The Fifth Avenue South sidewalk dissolves behind a cream-colored curtain.
BiCE is celebrating its hundredth year, though not, of course, on this polished stretch of Florida, but in the stone streets of Italy. The story begins in Milan in 1926, when Beatrice “Bice” Ruggeri, the daughter of Tuscan farmers, opened a trattoria that would become a dynasty. The family still owns the restaurant, now in its fourth generation, balancing devotion with the natural appetite for change. Beatrice’s granddaughters run the original; her grandson, Raffaele Ruggeri, oversees more than two dozen sister locations, from the UAE to Florida, as CEO of the BiCE Group.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
inside naples bice century old brand salmon dish
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Photography by Brian Tietz
inside naples bice century old brand in the kitchen
In Naples, the legacy of hospitality compounds. Raffaele is joined in ownership by Naples restaurateur Stefano Frittella, who has built a small empire downtown, with Caffè Milano, La Trattoria, Vergina and the new La Salière on 12th Avenue South. He’s also co-owner of Ristorante Sibilla in Tivoli, a 300-year-old restaurant—considered among the oldest in the world—which has been in Stefano’s family for five generations.
A fixture on Fifth since 2003, the Naples location reopened last December after closing for a six-month makeover. Raffaele and Stefano understood the challenge: To redesign an institution is to risk erasing what made it beloved in the first place. The owners leaned on Sinfonia Group, the Italian design studio led by architect Alessia Vicenzi, who considers the project a restoration. “The concept was great, but it was outdated,” she says. She didn’t want to replace a quarter-century of character with the placeless, high-gloss sameness that often defines contemporary renovations. “We wanted to avoid that—to keep its identity and history,” she adds. Her firm, which has worked with Moncler, Dolce & Gabbana and Piombo, approached the design as if it were a new dress. “You are not supposed to remember the dress,” Alessia says. “You are supposed to remember how it made you feel.”
Photography by Brian Tietz
inside naples bice century old brand sascha ruggeri
The Ruggeri family channels Northern Italy in the reimagined BiCE on Fifth Avenue South. From lush cobalt interiors to thoughtful dishes that break the mold from standard Italian-American cuisine. The founder’s great-grandson, Sascha, (pictured here) helps oversee operations.
The sculptural, white bar catches light like a porcelain dish, but it’s BiCE’s signature blue that holds the eye. The defining note in Sinfonia’s redesign, the color appears first in the central banquette, then repeats in the hand-stitched chair backs, the wall panels, and the broader Sinfonia design concept from glassware to linens, turning color into composition. Mosaic detailing echoes the custom textile—a filigreed pattern of blue birds and florals, designed for BiCE—so that when your hand runs from chair arm to counter edge, the patterns answer one another like a call-and-response. Nothing was chosen in isolation. The chairs are Italian, the millwork is Italian, the very bones of the room were pre‑assembled in Italy, tested there, then disassembled and shipped across the ocean. Twice built, once installed.
The restaurant rediscovers the dream of escape, the kind that loosens your shoulders before you’ve lifted a fork. Italian moldings suggest a Roman palazzo filtered through a Northern Italian eye. Gossamer curtains gather in soft folds. The fabric pools along the floor and floats across the ceiling, softening the acoustics and breaking the room into murmuring chambers instead of a single roaring hall. “We used drapes almost like architectural elements—not to divide the restaurant, but to create intimacy and give it movement, like one long rolling wave,” Alessia says.
Photography by Brian Tietz
inside naples bice century old brand wine racks
Above the central blue banquette, a palm tree rises, more modest than the olive tree Alessia first sketched. The centerpiece had to be adapted to Naples’ weather, while serving as a reminder that the restaurant is meant to feel like an indoor secret garden, with a 90-seat main dining room, 10 bar seats and an expanded, bougainvillea-wrapped terrace, set for 81.
When the restaurant first reopened, they modernized the menu, only to meet resistance. Regulars wanted their remembered dishes, the pastas and veal preparations. The restaurant, wisely, drew closer in spirit to the BiCE people remembered, essential Italian-American classics, such as veal parmigiana, and refined them.
Photography by Brian Tietz
inside naples bice century old brand tiramisu dish
Naples is not short on restaurants that call themselves Italian, but their cooking tends to orbit the same sun: tomato, garlic, mozzarella and plenty of comfort. BiCE traces a different Italy than most American diners know. “The old Italians who came in 1900, their food here never changed—that’s not Italy today, or then,” Raffaele says. His menu sticks to Northern Italy’s balance and reverence for pristine ingredients. Unlike the tomato-heavy South, the North relies on butter, rice and fresh egg pasta to create rich yet balanced flavors.
The risotto recalls its Milanese origin: saffron, once used as a pigment to stain the windows of the Milan Duomo, now tints the rice in golden devotion. And there’s the vitello tonnato with its thin, pale slices of veal dressed in an ivory sauce. Historically, it is a tomato‑less dish, born before the New World fruit muscled its way into Italian kitchens. The sauce is an improbable emulsion of tuna, anchovies, capers, egg yolks and olive oil, blitzed until silky. A single bite distills a simple alchemy—the way heat and time and care bring ordinary ingredients into focus.
Photography by Brian Tietz
inside naples bice century old brand dining room
Italian design studio the Sinfonia Group, led by architect Alessia Vicenzi, reimagined the restaurant’s interiors with deep blue reminiscent of Milan’s canals sparkling at midnight. Draped fabric hangs from the ceiling in undulating ripples.
As evening carries on, the dining room fills with stylish Naples couples, multigenerational tables who have been coming here for two decades and a scattering of younger diners drawn as much by the room’s Instagrammable lines as by the menu’s restrained take on Italian. They are greeted like family, because in Raffaele’s telling, they are. His son, Sascha, and Stefano’s daughter, Andrea, now oversee operations and marketing. “Our children carry us forward. They are the heirs to the crazy love affair that is hospitality,” Raffaele says.