The Last of Old New York: Coney Island's Two Old Tables

Gargiulo's opened in 1907 at the corner of Mermaid Avenue and West 15th Street, and by 1930 it had moved a few yards down the block to 2911 West 15th, where it still stands. From the start, Simonson writes, it was a special-occasion restaurant, the place for weddings and society meetings. The room still reads that way: up a flight of steps from the bar, very high ceilings, chandeliers, arched mirrored windows and a large cherub keeping watch.

The waiters still work in tuxedos, as Untapped Cities noted in 2022, though in 2014 they traded order pads for iPads, a switch the New York Times covered under the headline "At a Brooklyn Institution, Old School Goes iPad."

Then there is the tombola. When the check arrives at a table of eight or fewer, a small red plastic pineapple holding ninety dice is brought over. Someone picks a number from 1 to 90; if that die comes out, the meal is free, though drinks, tax and tip are not. Matthew Cutolo, the young family member who has become the restaurant's public face, told Simonson that customers win once or twice a week.

The Gargiulos are long gone from the business. In April 1965 the Russo brothers, Michael, Nino and Victor, bought the restaurant; they had started out in the early 1960s with a 16-seat pizzeria on Nostrand Avenue. By now the Russos have owned Gargiulo's longer than the family whose name is on the door, and they marked its centennial in 2007.

The work is split among relatives, per Simonson's 2025 account: Louis Russo keeps the books, Rae plans events, Nino handles publicity, Mike is head chef and Anthony runs the dining room, with Cutolo, also a chef, in the kitchen. The signature dish, penne Pasqualina with zucchini, onion, prosciutto, fresh tomato and cream, was created in the 1980s by Carlo Parmigiano, a Neapolitan chef the Russos hired. "You can only get Penne Pasqualina in one place, and that's us," Cutolo told Simonson.

The answer to who keeps it alive isn't romantic: a large family has divided the labor, and a younger member is visibly stepping forward. The tombola, the tuxedos and the cherub are what you see; the family is what keeps them there.

Anthony "Totonno" Pero came from Naples and made pizza at Lombardi's in Little Italy before opening his own shop at 1524 Neptune Avenue in 1924. His family still owns it. The menu on the restaurant's site is short enough to memorize: a traditional pie with mozzarella, tomato, grated cheese and oil, and a white pie without the tomato, both 14 inches.

The oven is the point. Totonno's bakes in a coal-fired brick oven, and coal ovens, as the Brooklyn Paper put it in 2011, are illegal in New York unless they have been grandfathered in or get a very rare approval. Time Out reported last December that this one has been repaired over the years but never replaced. When the James Beard Foundation named Totonno's one of its America's Classics in 2009, it credited the original oven with the crust's char.

The honor came at a hard moment. A fire in March 2009 closed the shop, which reopened on February 12, 2010, according to the Brooklyn Paper. In October 2012 Hurricane Sandy flooded it. Both times, the family reopened.

Today the shop belongs to Pero's grandchildren: Antoinette Balzano, her sister Louise "Cookie" Ciminieri and their brother Frank Balzano, all now in their seventies and eighties, as the New York Post reported in December 2025. For now Totonno's opens on weekends, per its own site, with delivery through the apps; Antoinette Balzano told us in October 2026 that pies can be eaten at the shop as well as taken away.

In May 2024 the family said publicly that it was looking for a buyer or investor. "We're coming up in age, and we don't have the manpower to continue," Ciminieri told the New York Times. No deal was completed. At the end of 2025 the search resumed; Balzano told the Post she had received more than 200 inquiries, and, as Brooklyn Magazine reported in January, she is weighing candidates on character as well as price. What she wants, in her words: "Someone who has a passion for history, and would want to keep everything as close as possible to the meaning of Totonno's."

As of this writing we have found no report of a completed sale or partnership. The city health department inspected the shop in March 2026, and its site still lists weekend pickup. If you plan a trip around it, check the site first.

It would be easy to say Coney Island would lose its soul. That isn't quite true. The boardwalk, opened in 1923, was made a scenic landmark in 2018. Gargiulo's has a next generation at work. What is at risk at Totonno's is narrower and harder to replace: a specific pizza, made the same way in the same building since 1924, in a kind of oven that is very hard to get approved in New York today.

The two restaurants are two answers to the same problem. A large family with a plan for succession has kept one room full of tuxedos for six decades. A small family kept the other going through fire, flood and a pandemic, and has been honest that it cannot do so much longer. To see the difference for yourself, book a table at Gargiulo's and ask about the tombola before the check comes; on a weekend, order a traditional pie from Totonno's and carry it toward the boardwalk. Our Coney Island neighborhood guide has the rest of the day.