Civita Italia brings housemade pasta and modern Italian dining to Short Pump

Civita Italia is bringing a big, polished Italian pitch to Short Pump, and the kitchen is leaning on housemade pasta to make the concept feel like more than another broad red-sauce import. The new restaurant was headed for a 7,000-square-foot building at 3401 Haydenpark Lane in GreenGate, with EAT Restaurant Partners aiming to pair a flexible dining room with a menu that spans Italian traditions instead of chasing one regional lane.

That breadth is the point. Chris Tsui, founder and president of EAT Restaurant Partners, has said the restaurant will not lock itself into one part of Italy, but will present Italian food more generally, with fresh pasta, traditional sauces, antipasti, fresh seafood and classic dishes in a refined, contemporary style. In pasta terms, housemade noodles are doing a lot of work here: they signal craft and enough kitchen discipline to make the shape, texture and sauce pairing matter, but they also serve as the calling card for a menu that wants room to roam.

Kevin LaCivita is overseeing the food, and Tsui described him as a classically French-trained chef whose cooking he has admired for more than 20 years. That kind of long-running personal trust matters in a project like this, especially when the restaurant is trying to land somewhere between neighborhood dinner spot and destination room. EAT said Civita Italia will include bar seating, lounge areas and an outdoor patio, and Tsui said it will be open seven days a week for lunch and dinner.

The development behind it has been moving for a while. EAT bought the 0.2-acre site for $1.2 million, according to Henrico County records, and had been working on the project since the fall of 2024. Richmond BizSense reported the opening was expected in June 2026, while WhatNow said the target was next month, though no exact launch date had been announced. Either way, Civita Italia was being set up as EAT’s first new concept since Wong’s Tacos debuted in 2019.

That makes the room at GreenGate more than another address on the local opening list. EAT Restaurant Partners, which Tsui launched with Osaka Sushi & Steak in 2002, had a roster of 12 Richmond-area restaurants as of December 2024. Civita Italia is the company’s latest attempt to turn scale into identity, and whether that broad Italian brief reads as ambition or diffusion will come down to how well the pasta, the sauces and the room all pull in the same direction.