Pastori's

What happened after

closed for good after close of business Sunday June 8 2014; owner had operated it 28 years

Closure date on record: 2014-06-08

What happened on the show

Two decades of success had curdled by the time Robert Irvine reached Pastori's in Ellington, where Bill and Georgia Savvidis were down to what looked like the restaurant's final months and a fraying marriage. The rupture had a specific trigger: Bill had fired his head chef Steve, who was also his son, and the fallout damaged both the family and the food, whose quality the customers felt most. On top of the bad cooking and the family strife, Irvine had to contend with terrible decor. His response ran the usual course, a menu transformation and a retrained kitchen crew, with the design and build team resetting the room on the show's two-day, roughly ten-thousand-dollar footing. As often here, the hardest repair was not the dining room but the family running it.

After the cameras left

Pastori's closed for good after the close of business on Sunday, June 8, 2014, ending a run the owner had kept going for twenty-eight years. We rate the closing high confidence. For a restaurant that had already been described as living on borrowed time when Irvine visited, and whose troubles were as much familial as financial, the 2014 shutdown was less a surprise than a delayed conclusion. The West Road address in Ellington lost a long-standing Italian restaurant.