The Riviera Espresso Machine
Sometimes called 'La Riviera', was manufactured by Zacconi Guadenzio of Milan, Italy before the reorganization of the company into the Zacconi Workshop. Unfortunately, it has become an Orphan machine with little to no part support for the older models. The Riviera is a wonderfully simple Spring Piston Home Espresso Machine to use and maintain, as the entire piston seal system is composed of 3 seals. It doesn't use a rod seal, the group to boiler seal is either a large flat teflon seal or a black high temp paper seal. One complicating factor with the Riviera is that Thomas Cara Ltd of San Francisco, CA imported a rebadged Riviera Machine that used various names - some are called the "La Cara", some maintained the Riviera name, and for the sake of simplicity we refer to this model as the "Riviera Eagle" due to its Belle Epoch styling. It is a spring piston lever machine which uses a 3 seal system on the piston. It is pressurestat controlled, most models have an external water line fill option, activated by a button on the deck. They came in various trim packages - copper with brass accents, chrome with brass accents, and a chrome on chrtome model. They use a 45mm portafilter basket, some of the baskets have a flat rim, and some have a curved rim (depends on the year of manufacture). There are some differences in the style of the grips. From the machines we've seen there is a high level of interchangeability of parts.
The Riviera Flat Top Espresso Machine is one of the variants of the Riviera espresso machine...for the sake
of naming, we will call it the "Flat Top Riviera". It has a bakelite
plastic boiler cover and this model generally has a black base and chrome
boiler. Aside from the cosmetics there are two main differences
between this machine and the Riviera Eagle.....the pressure gauge is
mounted by use of a compression fitting rather than a screw on type
gauge and most importantly, the piston uses 2 seals instead of the 3
seal system on the Riviera Eagle. The group appears identical from
the outside and the operation is the same, but the piston is shorter
and a bit smaller in diameter than the Eagle. Some of these machines
are badged "La Cara" and others "Riviera". Our reference machine has
no badging at all.
There is a 3rd Riviera machine which is a manual lever. All the parts are interchangeable with the other 2 EXCEPT the piston seals, which do not match either the Eagle, or the Flat Top, we refer to this manual lever espresso machine as the "Baby". Parts for ALL three machines are found in this section. Confused? Just email for clarification on which parts you need! |
