Riccardo’s Restaurant: the Montmartre of the Midwest

Ric Riccardo opened Riccardo Restaurant and Gallery in 1934 in a sliver of a space at Rush and Hubbard streets in Chicago. Tribune journalist Rick Kogan writes, “Ric’s was in its time — from the mid-1930s to about the late 1980s — a remarkable gathering place for artists, writers, journalists, opera singers and movie stars, admen, drunks, scalawags and bon vivants, real and would-be. It was called the Montmartre of the Midwest.”