At 83 years old, Dominick Pulieri has no kids, but what he has had for decades is a chain of popular pizzerias based out of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware: Grotto Pizza. But when the time came to put his 65-year-old brand, a member of PMQ’s Pizza Hall of Fame since 2013, in new hands, the beloved pizza icon had a problem. To whom could he entrust it?
Pulieri finally turned it over to a group of four employees with a combined 100 years of experience at Grotto Pizza.
As the Cape Gazette reports, the transaction was handled months ago with zero fanfare. Pulieri and the new owners signed the contract one morning in early 2025, then went right back to work. It’s unclear how the Cape Gazette learned about the deal, but, according to the Times Leader, it does not include Grotto Pizza stores in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
“While we are all part of the same tree, the Northeast Pennsylvania restaurants are a separate branch,” Armand Mascioli, co-owner of those locations, told the Times Leader. “The only change in ownership that occurred was for those Delaware restaurants. Nothing has changed up here.”
According to Jeff Gosnear, president of Grotto Pizza and an employee since 2002, little has changed in Delaware either. But Gosnear is now the majority owner and Adam Webster, the COO who started there in the late 1980s, is also a large investor. Meanwhile, two others with about five decades of experience between them have become minority owners.
Pulieri founded Grotto Pizza in June 1960 with his sister Mary Jean and her husband Joseph Paglianite (pictured above). Pulieri was just 17 at the time. As Pulieri explained to PMQ in 2013, “We had humble and primitive beginnings, with takeout only, no tables and a used oven.” The family was delighted to rake in sales of $99 on July 1, 1960, and to break $100 for the first time the next day, which was Pulieri’s birthday.
But Grotto Pizza evolved into a forward-thinking brand, opening a full-scale dough production facility in Delaware in 2021. When the pandemic broke out in early 2020, the company provided a weekly food allowance for all employees who’d been temporarily laid off. “We are taking every measure possible to demonstrate to our employees that we’re grateful for their service and are here to support them during these challenging times,” Gosnear said in March 2020.
And in the spring of 2021, Grotto Pizza offered a $25 AMEX gift card to every employee who got vaccinated against COVID-19. At that time, Grotto employed more than 1,800 employees during peak summer seasons and said it served 2 million pizzas annually.
In May 2023, Readers Digest featured Grotto Pizza’s Delaware stores on its list of the best pizzerias in each U.S. state.
Gosnear suggested that the company’s change of ownership has been barely noticeable, with the menu staying the same at all locations. There’s just one major difference: Whereas Grotto’s oldest locations occupy buildings that span up to 12,000 square feet, new ones will have a much smaller footprint—around 5,000 square feet.
Since Pulieri never married, he wanted to leave the brand in the hands of people who knew how to take good care of it. So it’s no surprise he picked members of his own team as the new owners. “I always talk about Team Grotto,” he told PMQ back in 2013. “All of the employees are important, right down to the dishwashers. I’ll often pull them aside and thank them; they’re unsung heroes.”
