Photo by Joe Hall via CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Owners of Coney Island’s Century-Old Totonno’s Pizzeria Won’t Sell It To Just Anyone
The family behind one of the country's oldest pizza shops is looking for "Someone who has a passion for history, and would want to keep everything as close as possible to the meaning of Totonno’s"
Totonno’s, the acclaimed Coney Island pizzeria, has stood on Neptune Avenue for over 100 years. But this one could be the South Brooklyn whole-pie institution’s last in the care of the family that founded it, according to the siblings currently holding down the fort.
Sisters Antoinette Balzano and Louise “Cookie” Ciminieri, with their 85-year-old brother Frank, are the third-generation heirs to one of the oldest pizza shops in the country, and they are reportedly in search of a buyer to, yes, relieve them of their post as caretakers to the shop, but also to ensure the Totonno’s legacy remains intact for generations to come. Balzano, a 74-year-old retired public school teacher, is looking for “Someone who has a passion for history, and would want to keep everything as close as possible to the meaning of Totonno’s,” as she told The New York Post. “At our age and our health, we can’t do this ourselves,” Balzano added.
Ciminieri and the Balzanos are the grandchildren of Anthony “Totonno” Pero, the shop’s storied founder, who they credit with bringing pizza to the States with him from Naples at the turn of the 20th century. Pero first started making pies out of the famed Lombardi’s in Little Italy in the early 1900s (then a grocer), which went on to become the first licensed pizza shop in the United States. He opened his own Coney Island outpost 20-ish years later in 1924, and it was a hit, by any metrics, lauded near, far, and wide for its stellar, simple, made-fresh formula, and its fidelity to the founder’s original recipes. Totonno’s survived fires, the Reagan administration, Sandy, and the Covid-19 pandemic (not without some brief closures here and there), but the absence of an heir apparent is testing its future in ways storms, regulations, and old wiring have yet to challenge it.
All hope is not lost, though. Last year, after initially announcing the business was for sale, Balzano received offers from hundreds of prospective buyers and investors. And she’s taking her time to vet them, not just for the right price, but for the right character. At least one candidate has surfaced, according to Balzano. “I have somebody that I really would love,” she told the Post, reluctant to say too much. But we’ll just have to wait and see who ends up with the keys.
