In the past two decades, countless shops and eateries in Nolita — from Pinkberry to the 130-year-old Alleva Dairy cheese shop — have closed as the neighborhood has grown increasingly trendy and expensive.
But one place has surprisingly stood the test of time: Rice to Riches, a spot devoted to numerous flavors of rice pudding, priced at $10 for an eight-ounce portion.
Its endurance — in a neighborhood where commercial spaces average well over $300 per square-foot, or over $100,000 a month in rent for some retailers — has long confounded New Yorkers.
Owner Peter Moceo Jr.’s brush with the law in 2005 — he was arrested for running a $21 million-a year sports gambling ring — spawned theories about the pudding shop being a front for unsavory activities. The rumors have persisted for years.
“How does a place that only sells rice pudding, even if it’s 20 different flavors of rice pudding, afford [the rent]?” the comedy TikTok account Pigeon Post speculated in a video last year. “The answer is crime!”
“Not gonna lie this s— is delicious, but seems fishy for sure,” one curious customer speculated in an impassioned 2021 Reddit thread devoted to the topic of “How is Rice to Riches Still in Business?”
Now, adding to the intrigue is the fact the Rice to Riches is expanding with a second location on Ludlow and Rivington in the works.
“It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside of an enigma,” reads a screen, visible through a window, in the soon-to-open shop, which Eater first reported on.
The original debuted in 2003, a time when “Sex and the City” was still airing new episodes and Manhattanites and tourists were more eager to spend money on cupcakes and Tasti D-Lite than avocado toast and pour-overs.
Moceo, a Bensonhurst native who didn’t respond to The Post’s request for comment, was hellbent on adding to the city’s sweet offerings after a trip to Italy in 2000.
He formed Rice to Riches Inc. in 2001, first opening a rice pudding test kitchen to perfect his concept. He shelled out $1.5 million of his own cash to build out the 3,000-square-foot, lucite-trimmed, Jetsons-esque space.
It was a struggle.
“[Landlords] refused to rent to me, because they didn’t see how I could pay the rent selling rice pudding,” Moceo told the New York Times in 2003, shortly after opening.
But his love of creamy grains sustained him.
”Ask my wife,” Moceo, then 43 and living in Trump Tower, told the Times. ”I don’t sleep; I’m up all night thinking about rice pudding.”
Initially, an eight-ounce pudding portion sold for $4.50, and Moceo had plans to open four more stores in Manhattan.
In 2003, Maceo told Nation’s Restaurant News that he was doing $15,000 to $18,000 in sales a week, and, in 2005, he told the Times the company began turning a profit an impressive 18 months in.
But it remained a single location institution — save for an outlet in Kuwait, opened via a licensing agreement.
Then, in February 2005, Moceo was arrested for running a $21 million-a-year sports gambling ring with his father, Peter Moceo Sr., and 18 others, including a Trump Tower concierge.
Cops confiscated over $1 million in cash and seized gambling records from Moceo’s condo and Rice to Riches, which then Suffolk County District Attorney Tom Spota said was launched with illegal bookmarking proceeds and used to launder the ring’s earnings, The Post reported.
“I have to laugh,” the Moceos’ arraignment lawyer, Raphael F. Scotto, told the Times of the alleged connection between his two clients and organized crime. “Too many people watch ‘The Sopranos,’ so everyone thinks they’re half an expert on all this stuff, you know what I mean?”
Neighborhood residents couldn’t help but speculate.
“Who the heck is going to get rich off rice pudding?” local carpenter Ozbbel Baez told The Post at the time.
Perhaps the proof — or at least an answer of some sort — is in the pudding.