Why Rico's Empanadas & Coffee matters.
Rico's Empanadas & Coffee is a familial Argentine café where Venice's boardwalk character meets baked empanadas, house-made chimichurri and a small independent operation that has grown alongside Ocean Front Walk for more than seven years.
Set along Ocean Front Walk near 17th Avenue and just steps from Muscle Beach Venice, the café occupies the pedestrian edge of Venice Beach between the Pacific Ocean, the recreation grounds and the dense commercial frontage extending toward Windward Avenue. A compact counter places food preparation directly against the movement of the boardwalk, giving the operation the scale of a beachside walk-up shop. Baked empanadas provide the primary food format, joined by espresso drinks, specialty lattes, matcha, juices and pastries. Rico and Rosie remain closely associated with the day-to-day operation as the business has expanded beyond its original footprint into adjoining boardwalk space. The result is a Venice café whose Argentine specialty has developed from a small counter into a recognizable piece of the neighborhood's beachfront food culture.
What defines Rico's Empanadas & Coffee.
Rico's Empanadas & Coffee is best known for building an Argentine empanada business directly on the Venice Beach Boardwalk and sustaining it there for more than seven years. Rico and Rosie operate the family business, with Rico's Argentine background giving the restaurant its culinary foundation. The original compact operation centered baked empanadas and coffee before the business expanded its physical presence along Ocean Front Walk. By early 2026, that growth had extended into neighboring storefront space and a related surf operation beside the food business, deepening Rico's connection with the beach culture immediately outside his counter. Empanadas remain baked rather than fried, and the business pairs them with its own chimichurri as the defining accompaniment. The restaurant backs that product with a money-back guarantee for customers who dislike the empanadas, turning confidence in a tightly focused specialty into an unusually explicit part of the operation. Coffee, espresso, matcha, specialty drinks, juices and pastries have since broadened the counter into an all-day café without displacing the Argentine pastry that established it.
Ground beef receives traditional Argentine seasoning with onions, hard-boiled egg and olives inside the beef empanada, building the filling around the savory-sweet contrasts associated with Argentine versions of the pastry. Beef and potato shifts the same meat into a starchier composition, and chicken supplies another meat filling within the baked shell. Spinach and cheese and sweet corn and cheese develop the vegetarian side through creamy fillings, and jalapeño and cheese introduces chile heat into the cheese-centered format. Roasted eggplant, onion and bell pepper form the vegan empanada, giving the vegetable filling caramelized depth before it meets the pastry. House-made chimichurri accompanies the empanadas as an optional herb-driven sauce, cutting across the richer meat and cheese preparations with acidity and aromatics. The beverage counter has grown around espresso, matcha and specialty drinks including the Rosie Special Latte, allowing coffee to function as a genuine second half of the business as its boardwalk footprint has expanded.
How Rico's Empanadas & Coffee fits.
Rico's Empanadas & Coffee works as the anchor for an outing connecting Venice's surviving canal landscape with the neighborhood institution created to preserve its many reinventions and the architectural remains of Abbot Kinney's original seaside resort.
Begin at Venice Canal Historic District, the surviving fragment of the waterways Abbot Kinney developed as part of Venice of America beginning in 1904. Kinney opened his resort on July 4, 1905 before a crowd of 40,000, with electric trolleys carrying people from Los Angeles and Santa Monica to canals traveled by gondolas and Italian gondoliers. A second group subsequently developed the New Amsterdam canals farther south, including waterways whose names preserve investors Moses Sherman and Eli Clark. Automobile growth transformed the district during the 1920s and 1930s as most of the original canals were drained and paved, leaving the surviving residential network later restored between 1991 and 1993. Continue to Venice Heritage Museum, an institution whose origins reach to the Venice Heritage Foundation established in 2008. The organization began with a collection and developed as a museum without walls through exhibitions and community programming before launching a capital campaign in 2021 that raised more than $300,000. Its first permanent home opened in March 2024 with This is some place, an exhibition examining successive reinventions of Venice through material ranging from the 1924 Venice Miniature Railway to the counterculture-era Hippie Phone Book. The museum moved to Westminster Park in March 2026, placing its archives and exhibitions within another chapter of the neighborhood it was created to preserve. Conclude at Venice Beach Recreation Center, where the beachfront carries the recreational legacy of Kinney's Venice of America into the contemporary neighborhood. Kinney's resort developed the shoreline as a mass-entertainment destination reached by electric railway, with a miniature steam railroad, amusement attractions and the nearby Grand Lagoon reinforcing the relationship between performance and the Pacific. The district later shed much of that constructed fantasy, yet the beachfront remained the neighborhood's great public stage as recreation, performance and street culture replaced the early resort machinery. Muscle Beach Venice became one of its most recognizable components, embedding outdoor strength training and bodybuilding into the same oceanfront landscape once occupied by Kinney's amusement world. The progression moves from the waterways that physically constructed Venice's founding fantasy through an institution preserving its successive cultural reinventions and culminates on the beachfront where public recreation continues the neighborhood's century-old relationship between performance and the Pacific.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
