Uno Pizzeria & Grill, the 83-year-old brand that gifted the world with the iconic deep-dish pizza style, abruptly closed three restaurants in Massachusetts on Sunday, January 11, and another shut down in Warwick, Rhode Island, according to various social media posts.

The now-shuttered Massachusetts locations were in Dedham, Braintree and Revere. Five Uno’s stores are still operating in Massachusetts, while Rhode Island has no remaining locations of the legendary chain.

Importantly, these are not newly opened stores that just never got off the ground. A post on the Warwick location’s Instagram account noted that it had been open for 40 years. Each of the three closed restaurants in Massachusetts had been in business for more than three decades—the Dedham spot, in fact, had survived for 37 years.

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In a statement to MassLive.com, UNO Restaurants, which owns Uno Pizzeria & Grill, said its leadership “made a strategic decision to close a few long-standing but underperforming restaurants.”

The statement continued: “Given market forces such as rising food costs, taxes, rents and labor costs, along with consumers’ changing dining habits, we had to take a hard internal look at all of our locations and close a few locations that were running tight margins.”

It’s part of an ongoing wave of Uno closures stretching back to at least 2024 in several eastern states, including Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Ohio.

What’s remarkable is the lengthy tenure of most of those pizza shops. In addition to the Massachusetts stores that were more than 30 years old, several others had been running for 25 years or longer. And a Bay City, Michigan store that closed last March stayed in business for nearly 20 years.

NRN reported last May that Uno finished 2024 with $114.3 million in sales, down 23% for the year. It also closed more than 25% of its locations.  

Uno’s Pizzeria & Grill first opened in 1943 as Pizzeria Uno in Chicago, although it’s now headquartered in Boston. At the time, founder Ike Sewell “wanted a pizza that was a meal,” as Jonathan Porter of Chicago Pizza Tours once explained to PMQ Pizza. Sewell hired Rudy Malnati Sr. for the task. “Malnati based his recipe off pizzas you’d find in the Turano region of Italy, like an Easter pie,” Porter said, and deep-dish pizza was born.

But the style has a confusing past. Others, such as Chicagoan and pizza historian Peter Regas, credit Sewell’s then-business partner Ric Riccardo with the invention of deep-dish pizza. Regas has said that a Mississippi woman named Alice Mae Redmond improved on Riccardo’s dough recipe by adding oil to the mix for a better stretch. And Redmond reportedly later took her talents over to the first Gino’s East.

In short, Uno Pizzeria became a sort of tree with many branches. Click here to take a deeper dive into the origins of deep-dish pizza.

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