Barboncino, New York City’s only unionized pizzeria, is closing down after 14 years in business, Eater New York reports.
Owners Jesse Shapell and Emma Walton blamed the closure on the high cost of doing business in the city.
“We came to Barboncino to restore its viability as a business and to ensure that it could last for years to come,” Shapell and Walton told Eater New York in a statement. “But, unfortunately, like so many other restaurants and bars that closed across NYC in the last year, Barboncino was not immune to the effects of rising costs and diminished sales. We are truly saddened but will always remember Barboncino with love.”
Shapell and Walton purchased Barboncino in Fall 2022. As the summer of 2023 approached, workers at the popular wood-fired Neapolitan pizza shop filed for a union election through the National Labor Relations Board with the support of Workers United, a national labor union.
In May 2023, Barboncino Workers United asked the restaurant’s owners to recognize the union, which would have prevented the need for an NLRB election. When the deadline for recognition passed, the employees moved forward and voted unanimously to unionize in July 2023.
According to the New York City Central Labor Council/AFL-CIO, Barboncino’s employees were pushing for “better wages, more control over scheduling, clear disciplinary procedures and a ‘no tolerance’ policy for sexual harassment” and hoped to improve conditions for restaurant workers at other restaurants, “a major sector in NYC…rife with labor abuses.”
After he and his fellow workers voted to unionize, bartender Mike Kemmitt said, “I’m proud to be part of the fight to bring order and justice to the nation’s fastest-growing, least-protected industry. My heart belongs to Barboncino Workers United.”
At the time, Andrea Lopez, another Barboncino bartender and server, explained the employees’ thinking in a comment to Eater New York. “Service industry workers are not treated with the respect that we believe they deserve,” she said. “What we are doing is not about Barboncino specifically as much as it is about the restaurant industry itself.”
Despite what employees described as “decent working conditions” at Barboncino, another employee, bartender/server Susanna Resnikoff, told Eater New York, “Barboncino is a place where people stay for a long time. Even at one of the best places to work, these things can happen to you and you’re in this very precarious position.”
After the owners announced “with great sadness” that Barboncino will close on February 28, Barboncino Workers United released a statement saying, “Our community, one we have worked to preserve and improve, is being dismantled at the hands of absent owners that have repeatedly ignored our needs.” The statement said employees wanted to keep the restaurant’s prices “manageable” instead of “pricing out the neighborhood locals who helped build the restaurant into what it is” and asserted that negotiations for higher wages had stalled since unionization.
In a statement on Instagram about the closure, Barboncino’s owners made no mention of the union.
“It has been over a decade since Barboncino opened its doors on Franklin Ave.,” the statement read. “It has been an honor to serve Neapolitan pizza, Italian wine, gelato and cocktails to every guest who came through our doors. We have built such beautiful friendships with our regulars, employed so many incredible people, and been involved with some awesome neighborhood organizations and events.
“We believed in Barboncino’s long-term potential, but because of rising economic strains, diminished sales, and other industry-wide challenges, it is with great sadness that Barboncino must put out the oven-fire and close the doors….We took over Barboncino in October of 2022 with the goals to improve the working conditions, fine-tune the menu, and restore the restaurant to the glory that we experienced when it first opened in 2011. This is where our passion and love for restaurant management and work began, the building blocks for our life’s work. So, please come raise a glass of Lambrusco and enjoy a Margherita pizza to celebrate all the amazing memories.”
