RESTAURANT NEWS | VIRGINIA
Civita Italia Gets the Old Richmond Team Back Together
CIVITA ITALIA | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Maria Rodriguez
6:32 a.m. ET, Aug. 8, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.
Fifteen years ago, chef Kevin LaCivita was hanging goat legs for prosciutto at The Blue Goat, the Richmond restaurant where the kitchen found uses for everything from rabbit bellies to pig ears.
Now he’s making carbonara in a shiny new restaurant built from the ground up, with a large dining room, a sprawling bar, and considerably more square footage than the average neighborhood Italian joint.
LaCivita has reunited with several members of The Blue Goat team for Civita Italia, a restaurant devoted to fresh pasta and Italian classics in the GreenGate development. It is the first restaurant devoted to classic Italian cooking from EAT Restaurant Partners, the Richmond group behind restaurants including Red Salt, Lucky AF, and Fat Dragon.
Civita brings him back to the European cooking that has followed him through most of that career. After traveling around Italy, LaCivita returned with ideas for house-made lasagna, carbonara, bolognese, shrimp fra diavolo, and salsiccia alla vodka. The menu also includes arancini, whipped ricotta, beef carpaccio, lobster risotto, branzino, veal marsala, and chicken Parmesan. Prime steaks and a pork chop cover anyone who has reached the limits of pasta, assuming such a condition exists.
The restaurant occupies a large space in GreenGate, the mixed-use community near Short Pump Town Center. Curved booths and leather seating surround a sizable bar and lounge, while a patio and private dining room add still more places to eat. Aperol spritzes and negronis come from taps.
Richmond’s better restaurants once clustered in neighborhoods close to downtown. Increasingly, they are following diners into the suburbs, where developments such as GreenGate have given independent restaurant groups room to build big.
Civita is certainly that. But its story begins with something smaller: a chef returning to fresh pasta with cooks who remember when he was turning goat legs into prosciutto.
