Family-owned Italian restaurant opens in Southern Highlands

After the recession battered Nicolo Lombardo’s investments, he decided to return to his roots: Sicily, at least in spirit and taste. Lombardo and his wife, Nancy, debuted Nicolo’s Cucina Italiana in Southern Highlands on Monday, and he hopes to bring the flavors of the island to the southern Las Vegas Valley.

“Everything is good. Everything is beautiful,” Nicolo Lombardo, 72, said with a smile on the restaurant’s opening day, animated despite having a tooth pulled earlier that morning.

His restaurant serves a full menu of Italian classics and some original dishes, all of which started as recipes in Nancy’s cookbook. It is open for dinner seven days a week, 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., at its location on the corner of Southern Highlands Parkway and Cactus Avenue.

The new kitchen, as “cucina” translates into English, isn’t the Lombardos first venture into the restaurant business after more than 40 years stateside.

Nicolo Lombardo left Sicily and arrived in San Francisco Bay on Jan. 11, 1962, he said. With no English in his vocabulary, he took odd jobs like mowing lawns and cleaning bathrooms. As he grew accustomed to his new surroundings, he started a janitorial business with a few friends.

His father came to the U.S. in the 1930s, Nicolo Lombardo said, and he “was born with a feeling to come to America. I want to see America.”

Within a few months of being in California, he met his future wife, Nancy, who had moved to the Bay Area with her family around the same time. They married less than six months later.

As the janitor service gained momentum, Nicolo Lombardo eventually opened three restaurants in Oakland, Calif. He and Nancy raised two children, sold the businesses and moved to Las Vegas on Feb. 12, 2002—Lombardo is good with dates. He then began investing in real estate as the valley’s housing market took flight.

He made a lot of money—“wheeling and dealing,” as he put it—but after the bubble burst, so did their income. Lombardo estimated he lost $2 million in real estate holdings as prices plunged.

So, seeing no other options, after selling their house and renting an apartment, Lombardo invested $150,000 in February into an empty restaurant in a strip mall on Southern Highlands Parkway. He completely renovated it, installed a new kitchen, new floors and outfitted the walls with artists’ impressions of the Italian landscape.

“I want to be good to the end,” Lombardo said about shouldering such an undertaking at his age.

He envisions Nicolo’s Cucina Italiana as a more affordable option for families hungering for Italian cooking, but with the taste to match up with kitchens on the Las Vegas Strip.

Recent events have made him wary, so, although Lombardo trusts in his chef’s skills, he remains cautiously optimistic about the restaurant’s future.

“I don’t know if I did right or wrong,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, and we’re old.”

Nicolo’s Cucina Italiana is located on the south side of Southern Highlands Marketplace.