Michelle Filippou closed Mezzaluna Saturday night. She came by our shop earlier in the week and let us know. She found the decision to be bittersweet and all of us who have ever struggled to run a business and finally had to throw in the towel know what she is going through. Jethro Tull captured the feeling in “Farm On The Freeway.”
The restaurant space in the Chasco building has been through various incarnations over the years, but Mezzaluna was absolutely our favorite. The Mezzaluna pizzas were more expensive than the national chain pies, but worth every penny of the premium. Over the years, Carolyn and I tried out most of the items on the menu. The garlic knots and several of the sandwiches were right up at the top of our many favorites there.
We ordered a small pizza exactly once… It dawned on us that we didn’t have any leftovers to take home. We only ordered large pizzas from that point on.
Carolyn and I made it a ritual to walk over after we’d closed up our shop on Friday evenings. We missed a few Fridays over the years, but generally made up for it by showing up for “all you can eat” spaghetti during the week.
Back in 2012, Carolyn and I went to Japan for our son’s wedding. I had been working on the Mezzaluna website, so I took my copy of the menu with me and got this picture in the Narita airport. I printed it out with the title “Hello Delivery?” and gave it to Michelle. While Mezzaluna offered delivery, Narita was a bit outside of their regular service area. Michelle put the picture up on the divider between the kitchen and the dining room and there it stayed.
We had Mezzaluna cater the party for our son and his bride when they came to visit New Port Richey.
We also had our election night party on the patio last year.
Running any small business is hard, but running a restaurant poses a special set of challenges. A restaurant owner can’t survive long term if they only get crowds on the weekends. It takes steady business all week to cover the overhead.
The much touted special events generally don’t help much. Most of the special events are on the weekends, when the restaurants have crowds already. The added competition of food vendors in the park probably doesn’t help.
Some of us run businesses that aren’t completely dependent on foot traffic. My own company falls into that category. If we had to depend on foot traffic, we’d have gone out of business years ago. While folks are welcome to bring their computers into our shop or drop by when they need to buy a new computer or accessory, the bulk of our business is, and has always been, somewhere else. Our shop serves primarily as a base of operations.
When we see a business close downtown, we need to understand that no business can survive without customers. If we want businesses downtown instead of empty storefronts, we need to make a point of spending our money supporting those businesses. Otherwise, Pogo had it right: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I’d love to see Greater New Port Richey Main Street take what has happened to Mezzaluna as a wake up call and redouble its efforts to help promote our downtown businesses and help the owners develop the skills that they need in order to survive. Main Street used to have monthly Business Breakfasts where a member business would make a presentation and the businesses would share ideas for promoting each others businesses. The Lunch N Learn series that replaced them haven’t been quite on point.
We had adopted Mezzaluna as our routine hang out on Friday evenings. We’ll pick out another restaurant now and carry on the tradition of supporting one of our fellow local businesses. I encourage you to do the same. The $30 or $40 bucks you spend at a Golden Corral, Red Lobster, or another chain restaurant on 19 doesn’t help New Port Richey nearly as much as spending the same dollars at a local restaurant downtown.
The good news is that a new restaurant, Johnny Grits, will be taking over the space occupied by Mezzaluna in a couple of months and the pizza oven is going next door for a take-out pizza operation. I’m looking forward to being able to call Michelle in a month or so and ordering a pizza to go.
In the meantime, I’ll fondly remember all the great times we had eating at Mezzaluna over the years.
That and I’ll think about the Ford F-150 I used to own…
Rob Marlowe, Mayor
We are sad to see this happen in downtown. I often would go to Mezzaluna’s for lunch with friends. We will definitely do take out because we love their pizza, and we look forward to helping to patronize our other downtown restaurants. We love our downtown.
And on a side note, I agree that this is an opportunity for Main Street to do some reevaluation. We have so much potential!!
Horrible. I’m going to miss the only other pizza in town that was fantastic! Thank goodness for Leaning Tower or I’d be totally out of luck.
It’s sad that these businesses can’t survive in New Port Richey because of the overall reputation of the area. No one wants to come unless they’ve been here before–and for many, the only impression they get on their first go is an event that is sometimes of… lower quality than we’d probably like them to see.
We should absolutely end the focus on events and concentrate on the chicken-and-egg argument between economic development through luring industry and making New Port Richey a fantastic place to live 7 days a week, 12 months a year.
Right now it’s a retirement destination that sometimes people pass through as they drive US19 to “better” areas like Trinity, Dunedin, and Clearwater.
It should not be that way. We’re one of the few areas close to Tampa and St. Petersburg that aren’t susceptible to major hurricane flood damage. That should be one of our focuses.