Just yesterday, we published an item about Village Square Pizza shutting down after nearly 50 years in business. For the past 27 years, the Woodmere restaurant has been operated by Joe DeGaetano, who purchased the restaurant from the previous owners in 1995. He will be 86 years old next month and he’s ready to retire.
Today we learned that Todd Leebow of Kind of One Concepts, the Cleveland-based hospitality group that operates The Last Page restaurant at Pinecrest, has agreed to purchase Village Square Pizza, thus sparing it from the proverbial wrecking ball.
“I grew up eating Village Square Pizza as a young Clevelander on the east side,” Leebow states. “I knew the phone number by heart. When I saw the announcement of their closing today, I wanted to see how I could prevent that. Now with Village Square Pizza as part of the Kind of One family, my kids will be able to grow up loving their pizza just like I did.”
For DeGaetano, who says the business never fully recovered from the pandemic, the sale is a bit of a relief.
“He’s a nice guy and I think he’ll do a great job,” he says. “He’ll have the resources to do a great job, I didn’t. I was never able to get it back to where it was before the pandemic. The hotels died too and that was a big portion of our business and the companies started to come back a little bit, but not to the degree when needed them to.”
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 8, 2022.
