The porch at 112 Riverside Avenue is still there. So is the two-over-two window trim, the hitching post someone mistook for a picket fence, and the chalkboard that used to list a weekly menu in Chef Mike Pietrafeso's handwriting. What isn't there anymore is Ada's Kitchen + Coffee, the café that occupied the old Riverside Post Office building and closed its doors in February 2024 after a rent dispute the owner called impossible to resolve. Two and a half years later, the building sits quiet a few steps from the Riverside train platform, waiting on a zoning process that hasn't finished yet.
A short drive up the same road, inside the Riverside Shopping Center, a different kind of quiet doesn't exist. Barnoodle opened in June and by midsummer was already the kind of place that fills up on a Tuesday. The two facts sitting side by side tell you something about Riverside that the porch alone won't: this stretch of East Putnam Avenue was never really about one tenant, however beloved. It was always about the half-mile itself, and that half-mile has kept moving with or without its most sentimental address.
The Building That's Still Waiting
Ada Cantavero ran a penny candy shop and newsstand out of that building for the better part of six decades, in a space her family bought in 1950. When she died in 2008, her nephew Ron Romaniello kept the tradition going until a planned renovation turned into something bigger. Pietrafeso, a Greenwich native and French Culinary Institute graduate, took over in 2016 and rebuilt the shop's identity around scratch-made sandwiches, locally roasted coffee, and a self-serve candy bar that still nodded to Ada. It worked. The café became enough of a neighborhood fixture that when Pietrafeso announced he wouldn't renew his lease, a petition to save the operation collected roughly 1,500 signatures within days. One longtime customer, Riverside resident Carpenter Forrey, put it to Patch this way: "'Friends' the show has Central Perk, 'Gilmore Girls' has Luke's Diner, and Riverside has Ada's."
The petition didn't change the outcome. Ada's closed in mid-February 2024. The Romaniello family listed the building and an adjoining two-family house for $3.25 million that December, and for a while it looked like the story might end there. It hasn't. According to a Greenwich Sentinel news brief from July 17, 2026, a redevelopment plan for the site would use a historic overlay to preserve the original shop building while adding roughly 2,000 square feet of residential space and a garage on the adjoining lot. The proposal is expected to go back before the Planning and Zoning Commission later this year, which means Riverside still doesn't have a firm date for whatever comes next at that address, only a framework for how it might finally get there.
Up the Road, Nobody's Waiting
While that process works itself out, Barnoodle has already answered the question of whether people will still walk East Putnam Avenue for something worth eating. The restaurant is the work of Seleste Tan and Mogan Anthony, the husband-and-wife team who spent the last few years building La Bistro in Cos Cob and Lady Wong Patisserie. Both grew up between Singapore and Malaysia, where noodles were less a category of food than a daily constant, and both spent years drawn to the plain-room noodle bars of the East Village before deciding to build their own version at 1247 East Putnam Avenue.
The menu leans directly into that background. Handrolls come out first, the way the restaurant's own menu insists they should, ranging from a simple salmon with ginger and tosazu to a Greenwich Handroll built around tuna, yellowtail, jalapeño, and yuzu kosho. The broth section carries the restaurant's real signature, a 24-hour ramen built on pork belly and chicken with bamboo shoot and black garlic oil, alongside a Thai khao soi and a spicy miso ramen. A July feature in CT Examiner highlighted the Royal Thai Branzino among the dishes on a menu that also runs through char siu pork lettuce wraps and three styles of dumplings. Tan told CT Bites she'd had her eye on the Riverside Shopping Center specifically, partly because her children's school is nearby and partly because she was already running a restaurant a mile and a half south on the same road.
What a Landmark's Absence Actually Proves
Set those two stories next to each other and the interesting part isn't that a beloved café closed or that a new restaurant opened. It's that the second thing happened without needing the first thing to be resolved first. For years, the case for Riverside's East Putnam corridor as a place worth visiting rested heavily on Ada's, a business a 2016 preservation ceremony described through a resident's line about the neighborhood being "a walking community" where people head out with kids, bikes, and dogs looking for somewhere to stop. That description didn't stop being true when Ada's closed. The walking continued. It just started ending somewhere else, whether that was Valbella's terrace or, as of this summer, a booth at Barnoodle.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live here. A single tenant, even one with 1,500 signatures behind it, was never actually load-bearing for the whole corridor. The corridor itself, dense enough and close enough to the train platform to reward a short walk, is the thing that kept working.
The Anchors That Never Left
None of this happened in a vacuum, because Riverside's dining scene never depended on just Ada's and whatever opened after it. Valbella has held its spot in an elegant Victorian Revival townhouse on East Putnam Avenue for more than 25 years, running three dining rooms and a landscaped terrace that has outlasted several waves of change on the same street. Aux Délices, founded in 1995 by James Beard Award winning chef Debra Ponzek and her husband Gregory Addonizio, has spent three decades building a following around seasonal prepared foods and a market case that turns over daily. Neither restaurant needed foot traffic from Ada's porch to stay full. They built their own reasons to stop.
East Putnam Isn't the Only Calendar Running
The restaurant strip is only one half of how Riverside actually spends a summer. The other half runs out of Riverside Yacht Club, founded in 1888 on the water at the edge of the neighborhood, where junior sailors worked through a genuinely packed racing calendar this year. The season included:
- Girl's Powder Puff Regatta and Boy's Stag Cruise, both run July 10
- Parent Child Opti Regatta on July 19
- Monkey Cup on July 30
- Color Wars FunDay on August 7
- A closing Island Beach BBQ on August 13, the traditional last full day of Junior Program, complete with paper plate awards
None of that requires a functioning café up the street to happen. It's its own rhythm, running on club membership and a marina calendar rather than on whatever storefront is or isn't open on East Putnam Avenue.
What Comes Next
The zoning process for 112 Riverside Avenue still has real steps ahead of it before anyone can say what the rebuilt version of Ada's will actually look like, or whether it will operate as a café at all once the historic overlay and added residential space are finalized. What's already clear is that whatever eventually reopens there will be joining a stretch of East Putnam Avenue that spent two and a half years proving it didn't need that address to keep drawing people off the train platform. Barnoodle answered that question for the newcomers. Valbella and Aux Délices answered it years ago for everyone else.
For residents who want a longer view of how a small commercial strip like this one holds its value over time, or who are simply curious about what a zoning change like the one proposed for Ada's building tends to mean in practice, The Sarsen Team has spent years watching Greenwich's village centers evolve one storefront at a time. We're always glad to talk through what we're seeing.
