Baldoria Builds a Night Around Shared Plates and 24 Taps

Riccardo Margarella and Paola Pignata's Mediterranean restaurant pairs Italian and Spanish small plates with craft pasta, pizza, cocktails, and a 24-tap self-pour wall.

By Eric Barton
6:59 a.m. ET, Oct. 19, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Baldoria opened in September in downtown Sarasota, Florida, and it doesn't ask you to commit to a single entree. Riccardo Margarella and Paola Pignata, the restaurateurs behind My Mamma Italian Kitchen, built their second Sarasota restaurant as the kind of place where dinner is assembled a few plates at a time, where nobody at the table has to order the same way.

The name helps explain the plan. Baldoria is Italian for celebration and good company, and Margarella and Pignata shaped the restaurant around that idea, drawing on their shared Italian heritage and on their travels, especially the Spanish habit of passing plates around the table. It's meant to work as a restaurant, a cocktail bar, or simply a place to gather, lively but still centered on the food and the conversation.

The menu follows the same logic. It opens with snacks and a tapas bar, then moves through focaccia sandwiches, larger plates, salads, and a section the restaurant calls Pizza Crunch.

The tapas carry Italian and Spanish twists, and the kitchen rounds things out with craft pasta plates and pizzas meant to land in the middle of the table. Truffled burrata and the fiery Pizza Crunch give a fair sense of the range, from delicate to loud.

The dining room and bar at Baldoria in downtown Sarasota.

Drinks get equal billing. A self-pour beer and wine wall runs 24 taps deep, worked with an electronic band that tracks your pours, so a taste can stay a taste or turn into a glass. There's a full cocktail list behind it, plus Spanish gin and tonics served Barcelona-style in balloon glasses. After 9 p.m., the restaurant leans into a second act, with lowered lights, gold masks on the bartenders, late-night bites, and curated beats.

The room itself is a little over 2,000 square feet, and getting it ready took more than two months of renovation, with decor that nods to the owners' Italian heritage and travels.

Baldoria Restaurant Sarasota Florida dessert

It's an easy format for downtown: come in for a tapa and a cocktail, order several plates for the table, or stay and let the evening run long. Baldoria's bet is that Sarasota would rather share dinner than split it into courses, and the room is set up to let the table decide.