Ricardo's venue to open in Woden at Skypark garage

• Interview: Ricardo De Marco

Watch out Woden. Ricardo De Marco is opening a new cafe in the town centre - but it will be a different concept to his popular Ricardo's Cafe at Jamison.

For a starter, the new cafe will be in a swish parking garage - the Skypark multi-storey car park on the corner of Melrose Drive and Worgan Street. It's set to open in July.

"I am opening up a store in Woden but it's not going to be a Ricardo's," De Marco says. "It's going to be everything I've learnt, including the build of a shop, things I wouldn't do again, it's going to be the perfect Ricardo's."

The new store will have a new name (he's still mulling over ideas), a different fitout and will be much smaller and more intimate than Ricardo's Cafe, which can turn over 1000 covers in one morning.

"I don't want it to be a monster like [the Jamison cafe]. I don't want to call it Ricardo's because I don't want people to go there thinking it's going to be this. I want it to be something totally different," De Marco says.

"We can do new ideas that we can't do [in Jamison]. So we want this one to be a nice, relaxed, intimate place."

The new cafe might eventually grow to be a big establishment but De Marco wants to start small.

And he takes inspiration from The Cupping Room in Civic as a cafe that serves the workers in surrounding office blocks but is also a destination in its own right for people who live in the area.

"We're going to get all the public servants there but I really want to get the locals around there, in Lyons, in Pearce and Torrens and Phillip," he says.

"I want it to be somewhere that people will come for a meal, I want to have really good coffee and really good cakes. It's got a garage feel, because it's a car park. We did a really modern garage cafe, it's got polished concrete floors, black tin roof and we've got stone."