It’s hard to walk away from the pizza business.
Anthony Santora keeps learning that lesson at Santora’s Pizzeria in Ocoee, Florida. Staffing issues have forced him to close his shop twice this year. Now he has teamed up with another restaurateur, Willie Laboy, who has faced his own troubles in the business. Together, the two men hope to turn around the pizzeria’s fortunes at last.
Santora, a veteran pizza restaurateur and contractor, took over the former Franco’s Pizza in July 2023—mostly as a labor of love—following the death of its previous owner, Debra Nix, in 2019. According to the Orange Observer, Nix’s husband put the failing business on Facebook Marketplace in early 2023, and after months of deliberation, Santora went for it.
The construction business has been Santora’s fulltime occupation for years, but pizza is another true love. The team at Franco’s Pizza had never quite gotten over the tragic loss of Nix, who died after a battle with cancer. Under Santora’s ownership, staffing problems plagued the pizzeria, forcing him to close it just a few months later. Then he reopened on November 1, 2023, under a different name—Santora’s Pizza. But finding employees remained a challenge. By January 2024, Santora only had one other pizza maker on staff and a total of four employees. Discouraged, he had to cut back the restaurant’s menu and hours. In March, he reluctantly closed the doors again.
Then, something happened—a “sign,” in Santora’s estimation, albeit not the type of sign that most would interpret as a hopeful one.
Santora explained how the pizzeria’s comeback unfolded in a Facebook post on June 12.
“I go up and check in (on) the place when I can to make sure everything is still working and clean,” he wrote. “Truthfully, that’s just an excuse for me to visit the place. Keep in mind I live 45 minutes away. I have had a lot of offers from people to buy the place, and I always find a reason to turn it down. I just cannot seem to part with it, even as it’s costing me a ton of money just sitting [there]. I was at the shop this past Saturday, walking around [and] doing some unnecessary maintenance. The place felt very sad to me, like it wants to be of service to the community.”
That same Saturday, Santora called his wife and discussed reopening the pizzeria. However, he noted in the Facebook post, “I just don’t want to open, then close again and go through all of that. I just needed another sign or something great to happen.”
As Santora went on to explain, that “sign” came along the very next day, an ironic portent that propelled Santora into action: Someone hurled a rock through the pizzeria’s front door window and smashed the glass. “They had every opportunity to go in and freely take or destroy whatever they wanted but instead just walked away,” Santora wrote. “I got a call from the neighbor, came to the shop, cleaned up the mess and repaired the glass. Now, it very well could have been someone just being stupid, breaking stuff, but it felt like the sign I needed.”

Inspired by the pointlessly destructive act, Santora took a new step forward: He contacted Laboy, who had previously owned Winter Garden Pizza Company, a pizzeria that went through multiple owners after Laboy sold it. Winter Garden had closed for good a year earlier. Laboy had also opened—and then closed—Orange Crate Café in 2022.
Like Santora, Laboy evidently couldn’t quite shake his love for pizza. “You would have thought he was waiting for my call,” Santora wrote. “Within 20 minutes, he was ready to go.”
Laboy quickly signed on as the new general manager at Santora’s Pizza. With Laboy’s menu changes and new workers in place, the restaurant held a soft reopen on June 24 “to pressure test” the pizzeria’s staff and new systems. “I was very happy today to sit back and watch Willie and his team execute,” Santora posted that afternoon.
The grand reopening took place on June 25, and Santora’s Pizzeria has been offering lunch and dinner service ever since. The menu features 14” and 18” pizzas as well as 10” pies on a cauliflower crust, plus hot sandwiches, pastas, wings, burgers, salads and build-your-own calzones.
And Santora is back where he feels he belongs. “I got into the restaurant business when I was about 18, and what I’ve learned about this business is that it’s a positive business,” Santora told the Ocoee Observer in January 2024. “I don’t mean money-wise, but I mean fulfilling-wise. When you serve someone in a positive way, they reward you with a positive reaction. I love lighting up people’s faces with something we create. You get addicted to that positive energy.”
More recently, via Facebook, he also expressed his gratitude to the vandal who inspired him to reopen the pizzeria. “Whoever broke that window,” Santora wrote, “thank you for the motivation I needed. Best $500 I ever spent. Please don’t do it again, though. lol.”