Randy Forrester, owner of Radici, at the pizza oven in January, 2023. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer
Washington Avenue’s Roman-style pizzeria Radici announced on its Instagram page Wednesday that it will close its doors for good this fall.
Radici’s social media post stated that the shop would be showing photos of some of its best pizzas from the past over the next month, “and we’re feeling sentimental as we’ve decided to close Radici.” The post said the pizzeria’s last day would be Nov. 18.
Radici opened at 52 Washington Ave. in July 2020. Owner Randy Forrester originally baked sourdough-crust, round Neapolitan-style pizzas. But in the summer of 2021, Forrester scaled back the operation at Radici – ending dinner service and running the venue alone – so that he could spend more time with his wife and young daughter. To streamline his kitchen work and buy himself more time to take orders from customers, he also switched to making sheet pans of thicker crust, Roman-style pizzas that baked at lower temperatures for longer.
Forrester and his wife moved to the Portland area from Allentown, N.J., where his fine-dining restaurant, Osteria Radici, was a semifinalist for the James Beard Best New Restaurant award in 2018. In 2019, Forrester was a semi-finalist for the James Beard Best Chef award for the Mid-Atlantic region. Earlier this year, Press Herald restaurant critic Andrew Ross named Radici to his list of Best 75 places to eat and drink in the area.
Forrester declined to comment on Radici’s closing when contacted Wednesday.
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