Once an Oregon dining great, McMinnville’s Nick’s Italian Cafe has closed, two years after new owners revived the now 49-year-old restaurant.
The wheels of the closure were set in motion a month ago. The News-Register covered the restaurant’s until-further-notice
closure, starting June 22, when a ventilation hood was found “non-compliant and requiring immediate replacement.” At the time, the restaurant management described the closure in a Facebook post as a “temporary goodbye” and indicated that it would reopen once problems with the hood were addressed.
But on Monday, July 27, an update via the restaurant’s Facebook page confirmed that the closure was permanent, due to the projected expense of repairs. “We would like to give a special thank you to our patrons and the community of McMinnville for supporting us. Unfortunately we have to close the doors for good due to the high repair costs. We loved serving you,” the announcement reads.
“That restaurant was 50-plus years old,” owner Scott Baldwin tells Eater, “and a lot of the equipment, including the hood over the range, was in that same vintage.”
A ventilation hood is a massive extractor fan (often with a built-in fire-suppression system) that removes aerosolized cooking grease, heat, and smoke from a restaurant kitchen. Without one operating properly, air quality and overall kitchen conditions plummet. It’s also one of the most expensive pieces of equipment.
Baldwin says that to bring the system up to contemporary code would have required a complete reconstruction of the kitchen, one projected to cost more than $100,000. Rather than take on such a rebuild, they’re shutting down. “It was just something that was not fixable … from a budget standpoint,” Baldwin says. It “just didn’t pencil for anybody.”
An equipment-related closure seems an unceremonious ending for what was a great comeback story for the legacy wine country dining spot.
The restaurant bears the name of Nick Peirano, who opened the Italian restaurant in 1977, when McMinnville was still a sleepy farming town, not yet a tourist hub for globally recognized wines. At the time, he had little culinary experience, but the gamble paid off. The restaurant became beloved — perhaps the area’s first destination restaurant, walking so Hayward, Grounded Table, and Alea could run — for family dinners and special occasion meals. It had white tablecloths and a menu of Italian classics, but was a favorite among regulars for its handmade pastas, minestrone, and wood-fired pizzas topped with house-stretched mozzarella.
Peirano’s legacy is inextricably wound up with that of Willamette Valley wine in general. He championed the industry, regularly hosting wine dinners with area vintners.
In 2007, Carmen Peirano, Nick’s daughter, took over operations and the following year, the James Beard Foundation named it an America’s Classic, an honor reserved for restaurants open for a decade or more “that serve as an enduring anchor for their communities by serving delicious food across many years.”
The Peirano family closed the restaurant in July 2023, citing COVID’s impact on the industry, and shared hopes to sell the restaurant as a turnkey business.
The buyers — Thomas Ghinazzi, Jordan Neale, Aaron Nieman, and Baldwin (who along with Rae Ellen Baldwin, founded De Ponte Cellars in 2001) — seemed well-positioned to reinvent the classic restaurant. At the time, they owned a five-year-old restaurant in Carlton called Earth & Sea, located in the space that now houses James Beard-nominated Hayward.
They re-opened Nick’s in July 2024 with a refreshed menu from Ghinazzi.
The format stayed true to the Italian roots, but they retired some of the long-standing items. Some of the best new dishes were the result of Ghinazzi using the restaurant’s wood oven to cook things besides pizza: lemon-brined chicken with risotto and tender little vegetables or foraged mushrooms in balsamic-spiked cream sauce blanketed with crunchy breadcrumbs.
The new owners updated the brick backroom, rebranded it as Refire Bar, and added a burger, pork belly, and chopped cheese sandwiches to the menu, casual options intended to give the bar its own identity. Outwardly, it seemed that the comeback story was cinched.
“It’s really a shame because it was really doing well. We were in a good place,” Baldwin says.
Oregon diners have had to say goodbye to Nick’s twice in three years. Whether a third act is possible remains to be seen. One way or another, it’s a sad day. Pour out a little pinot noir in memory of a wine country icon.
