Moving your pizzeria to a new location in the same town can be tricky. Moving to an entirely different town in another state—even if it’s just 15 minutes away—brings additional risks. Or so you might think.
That hasn’t been the case for Fabio’s Pizza. The restaurant, owned by the Cracolici family, has been slammed since it relocated from St. Clairsville, Ohio, to Wheeling, West Virginia, as The Intelligencer reports.
Fabio’s shut down its Ohio Valley Mall store in St. Clairsville last month, then re-opened in Wheeling, just across the state border, on Friday, August 1. Since then, their biggest problem has been keeping up with customer demand at the new store.
Two days after opening, Fabio’s had to put a hold on online orders, third-party delivery service and even phone orders at times due to the huge opening-weekend rush.
“It’s very busy, which has been the norm so far since we’ve been here,” Marianne Cracolici said, addressing a local Rotary Club meeting covered by The Intelligencer. “This is the busiest we’ve been since before COVID. We’ve been busier the last two days than we’ve been in five years.”
Fabio’s is a family-owned and family-operated pizzeria through and through. Tom Cracolici, Marianne’s dad, is a Sicily native who has worked in the pizza industry for decades. As he told LEDE News in 2022, he first learned about life in the U.S. from his dad, a World War II veteran.
“I came to America in 1974 because my father was a prisoner of war here, and he told us that it was the best time of his life. He got treated like a king even though he was a prisoner of war,” Cracolici said. “He was allowed to work even though he was a prisoner, and when World War II ended, he wanted his family to come here so we would have a better future. I don’t care what anyone says. This is the best damn country in the whole world.”
According to The Intelligencer, Cracolici ran three franchised pizza locations in Cleveland and the Akron/Canton, Ohio, region before buying the former Scotto’s Pizza in St. Clairsville. Cracolici renamed it after his son, Fabio, and kept the business running there from 1992 through late July 2025.
Relocating their pizzeria to Wheeling has allowed the family to expand and serve more customers; the dining room will seat up to 70 people. They’ve also applied for a liquor license and plan to open a bar, offer outdoor dining and build out a banquet hall for special events.
The Fabio’s menu includes made-from-scratch pizzas, calzones, subs and antipasto salads, plus daily pasta specials. A signature stuffed-meats pizza features six different meats and three layers of cheese.
Marianne said her dad has always “worked very hard. He’s instilled that work ethic in me and my brother, and hard work and dedication has paid off to get us to this point.”
Marianne, Fabio and their dad remain a high-functioning—and happy—team. “We still do everything together,” Marianne told The Intelligencer. “All of the staff that we have—it’s like family. Everybody came [to the new location], and everybody was very excited. This was a nice change.”
Finally, it’s interesting to note that Tom believes in cooking by instinct, not by a hard-and-fast recipe. “I get told that I should write everything down, but to me, it’s not the same,” he told LEDE News. “When my mom cooked, it was a little bit of this, a little bit of this, and a little bit of this. That’s because if it’s in your head, it’s in your heart.”
