He Promised His Pizza Shop to His Son. Now It’s Set to be Demolished

Billy Burns promised to give his Glendale, Arizona, pizza shop to his young son one day. Now it’s set to be demolished, thanks to a redevelopment plan that will expand a nearby 7-Eleven store.

According to Burns, as reported by local media outlets, the Glendale location of the two-store Raffaeles Pizza brand went on the chopping block after his landlord sold the property to a developer in December. Burns said he was notified in February that he had 120 days to vacate the site.

Although Burns still owns the much older Raffaeles store in Phoenix, he’s none too pleased with this turn of events, especially since the pizzeria has been a success for six years.

Burns has worked at Raffaeles since he was 15 years old. He was hired by the original owners, Raffaele and Antonietta Aquino, and later purchased the restaurant from them. He opened the Glendale location in August 2020.

“It’s my whole life,” Burns told KBTX. “This is all I’ve done. This is what I know. I’ve missed funerals, I’ve missed weddings. I’ve dedicated every part of my being as a man…to this business.”

Burns can take some consolation in the fact that the original Phoenix restaurant will carry on. But he had very specific plans for the Glendale store.

“The hardest part is my son, who is six years old. He would come over here with me, work in the shop and all that…As soon as he was able to talk, he said, ‘Hey, Daddy, one day can I have this restaurant when I’m old enough to work?’ I said, ‘You can have it now, kid, it’s yours.’ I’ve already got a second location. So I told him it was his.”

Burns became emotional as he contemplated breaking the news of the Glendale shop’s demise to his son. “How hard is it to tell [that to] your six-year-old son?” Burns said. “It’s not because I failed as a father. It’s not because I failed as a businessman. It’s because I’ve gotta shut down my business. What else can I do? To have to let him know we have to shut it down, not because we failed, but because of the change of times and they’re knocking down our building….There’s nothing we can do.”

It’s a painful loss to original owner Antonietta Aquino too. When she and her husband still owned Raffaeles, she often brought her oldest granddaughter, a baby at the time, to work with her. “We used to sit her on a swing in the corner…and if she would cry or fuss a little bit, the customers used to run over there and wind up the (mobile) and she would fall back asleep,” Aquino recalled.

Raffaeles serves classic New York-style pizzas as well as Sicilian pies, along with wings, sandwiches and strombolis. Burns said it’s the oldest New York-style shop in Glendale, and his own father worked in the restaurant at one time before Burns took a job there. The lead pizza maker has worked at Raffaeles for 28 years, and the manager started there 22 years ago, Burns added.

“You’ve got guys who have been here for the majority of their lives,” he told KBTX. “It’s not just me. It’s not just the Rafaelles name, it’s not just the location. This is people’s livelihoods.”