Sneak Peek: A New Kind of Italian Restaurant Is Opening in RiNo in 2025

The team behind the wildly popular Restaurant Olivia in Wash Park, one of our picks for the top 100 places to eat in the metro area, has revealed new details about its upcoming project: Emilia, which is scheduled to open on the first floor of the Current office building at 3615 Delgany Street in RiNo this spring/summer.

When it was first announced, Emilia was said to draw heavily from inspiration from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, home to such iconic Italian staples as Parmesan cheese, prosciutto di Parma and balsamic vinegar (balsamico) from Modena. After a sneak-peek tour with co-owners chef Ty Leon, hospitality director Heather Morrison and beverage director Austin Carson, we now know that inspiration will be front and center both literally and figuratively.

Before guests even enter the restaurant, they’ll see a window into a batteria, a stack of balsamic vinegar barrels decreasing in size from top to bottom that are used to age balsamic vinegar into the syrupy black gold that many U.S. diners have yet to properly experience.

In Italy, batteria are given as a gift to parents of a newborn child. So as Emilia is their new baby, it seems appropriate that the three were given these barrels from the owner of an aceto (vinegar cellar) they visited when researching for the restaurant. “It just blew our minds,” says Morrison. “Not just the food, but the warm embrace of the people and all these incredible ingredients. So we are going to be a restaurant where the ingredients tell a story.”

That story, while rooted in its namesake region of Italy, will be narrated by a distinctively Colorado voice. According to Leon, Emilia will be more focused on importing Italian techniques and philosophy than actual ingredients, which he hopes to source locally instead. So while we can expect dishes hailing from Emilia-Romagna’s capital, Bologna, such as tortellini en brodo (broth) and mortadella-based street foods, the components won’t always stick to what is traditionally served there.

“We're trying to merge the ideas of Bologna and Emilia-Romagna with what it means to live here in this landlocked, arid state,” Leon explains. “Can we take ideas from Italy and turn them into what you would get in Colorado if we're trying to create, like, an Italian-Colorado cuisine? Can we use local flours? Can we use local pigs? Does tortellini even need to be filled with pork? We're thousands of miles away from the place where they need to be filled with pork. Do we need to do the exact same thing here? I don't think that's true.”

So think mortadella made with Colorado bison rather than pork. Or prosciutto using trout rather than ham flown in from Parma. Traditional? Maybe not. But one could argue it is authentic.
Traditional means using the same ingredients that are used in the old country, which in the U.S. means importing them. But Italy is a country of many microclimates. Each produces its own unique ingredients, and those ingredients define each region's unique cuisine.

Authenticity, meanwhile, is about sincerity, even when using non-traditional ingredients. Authenticity in Italian cooking comes from the practice of letting fresh, local, quality ingredients shine through relatively simple techniques. The ingredients don’t need to come from Italy for the dish to be authentic.

In that respect, Emilia hopes to be the latest in a string of restaurants that use their ethnic origins as more of a starting place than a destination. What Sắp Sửa is to Vietnamese cuisine or Alma Fonda Fina is to Mexican, Emilia hopes to be for Italian.

“We’re not trying to be classically this or authentically that,” Carson says. “There’s a trend in the Denver market to start with a cuisine of inspiration and take it somewhere new. ... I would hope that Emilia fits in that same idea. It’s Italian, but just outside of that. I think that’s a really fun place to be, creatively, and also one of the reasons that makes [Denver] so compelling right now from the standpoint of food.”

One area where diners can expect a direct-from-Italy experience, however, is the wine. While there will certainly be plenty of Italian standards like Chiantis and Barolos, the Emilia team also hopes to reintroduce another less popular Emilia-Romagna staple — Lambrusco.

“It would be fun to turn a Lambrusco skeptic into a Lambrusco fan,” Leon says with a smirk.

That perspective seems to hit the core of what the Emilia team is trying to achieve, and what makes Emilia one of the most anticipated openings of 2025 as a restaurant that aims to import not ingredients, but the emotions that food and cuisine can bring.

“We’ve been to Emilia-Romagna several times now, and part of what’s inspiring about it is what it evokes in us emotionally,” says Carson. “We want to let that transfer to the guest experience [at Emilia]. We want to put people in a position to experience the emotion that we had just being in that place.”