With a view of Harvard Square from the Charles Hotel, Rialto offers a casually elegant, sophisticated atmosphere with comfortable banquettes, warm colors and four-star service. Rialto’s menu is created by James Beard Award winner Chef Jody Adams, and is inspired by French, Italian and Spanish regional dishes using seasonal New England ingredients. 

The menu changes seasonally, but always features long-time favorites such as Grilled Wellfleet clams with toasted garlic bread; slow roasted Long Island duck with braised escarole, roasted fingerling potatoes, Sicilian green olives; and a hot chocolate cream with seasonal fruit and housemade ice cream. 

Rialto’s wine program offer more than 200 bottles of hand-selected wines and a reserve list of hard-to-find wines available by the bottle or in tasting flights.

Chef Jody Adams
The connection between food and happiness began at an early age for Jody. Her mother was an adventurous cook and passed along an appreciation for European cooking, and, more importantly, European living. When she graduated from Brown University with a degree in anthropology, Jody took her first culinary position as part-time help to Nancy Verde Barr, a food writer and teacher. In her apprenticeship, Jody assisted in the classroom and helped test recipes for Nancy’s cookbook on Italian immigrant cooking, We Called It Macaroni (Knopf, 1991).

After deciding on a career in the restaurant business, Jody worked her way through the ranks of Boston’s best restaurants. She began as a line cook at Seasons restaurant in the famed Bostonian Hotel under chef Lydia Shire in 1983. Three years later, she helped open Hamersley’s Bistro with Gordon Hamersley as his sous chef. In 1990, she took the executive chef position at Michela’s in Cambridge. While at Michela’s, Jody developed her reputation for carefully-researched regional menus that combined New England ingredients with Italian culinary traditions.   “I have an enormous amount of respect for local cooking traditions. Regional cuisine has had time on its side – it’s taken centuries to figure out how to make the best of what’s available nearby. Technique on its own doesn’t count for much. A new technique or personal interpretation only becomes part of the tradition when it enhances the taste of the dish’s ingredients.”

In September 1994, Adams opened Rialto with restaurateurs Michela Larson and Karen Haskell, forming the Sapphire Restaurant Group partnership. At Rialto, Jody’s focus broadened to include Italian, French and Spanish cuisine. Four months after the new restaurant’s opening, The Boston Globe awarded Rialto four stars, the newspaper’s highest rating, proclaiming that, “eating Jody Adams’ food at the stunning new Rialto is like stepping into a winter greenhouse just at the moment a spectacular hothouse orchid bursts into bloom, filling the senses.”

In the  Community
Rialto is more than just a restaurant. It is a member of the greater community. Since its opening in 1994, Rialto has been actively involved in numerous efforts to benefit a variety of nonprofit organizations and agencies.

The kind of events that Rialto has helped create and operate in the last several years has run the gamut from raising funds for a small, local dance school to hosting Boston Medical Center’s Grow Clinic, which raises $1 million a year. Rialto develops and executes galas for organizations such as Partners in Health, Share our Strength, the Massachusetts 9/11 Fund, Dance Umbrella and Ailey Camp.

Annually, the restaurant participates in several Boston traditions: the Greater Boston Food Bank’s Super Hunger Brunch and Community Servings’ LifeSavor and Pie in the Sky events. Rialto awards scholarships to two students from nearby Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School for their education in the hospitality field. 

Outside of the kitchen, Chef Jody Adams lends her name, support and culinary skills to organizations ranging from The Home for Little Wanderers to Girls LEAP (an empowerment and self-defense program for teenage girls) to the Harvard University Dining Services.