HAZLETON - For Jimmy Sabatino announcing that Vesuvio's Restaurant will close for good on Saturday was harder than squeezing into a booth at the restaurant that his family has run on North Wyoming Street for 50 years.
While taking a seat, he seemed to remember that the gap to the table used to be wider when he started working at the restaurant. That was 30 years ago when he was a 15-year-old high schooler.
The kitchen used to be right here, he said from the booth, recalling the compact layout before Vesuvio's expanded and remodeled. Over his head, a black-and-white photograph showed a street car going down North Wyoming Street.
His roots on the street go back to 1947 when his paternal great-grandmother Anna Sabatino owned the building that is now the restaurant and lived upstairs.
Cindy Batista pulls a pizza from the oven at Vesuvio Italian Restaurant on 101 North Wyoming Street on Friday April 25, 2025.(John Haeger / Staff Photographer)
A jewelry store was downstairs and later a hairdresser, hot dog place and then his grandparents, Renato and Pina Castagliola, arrived from Italy in 1975. She had relatives in the city, and they opened Vesuvio's right away.
While working with them, his parents, aunts and great grandparents, Sabatino learned more than the recipes for Sicilian pizza, stromboli and other items on the menu.
"I learned the old-school work ethic," he said. "I wish we could go back to those days."
Instead he is looking to continue something of his grandparents' tradition in the two other Vesuvio's restaurants and pizzerias that he and his siblings will continue to operate in Drums and Wilkes-Barre.
His sister, Jenna Bove, said it best: Their grandparents' legacy isn't a building.
"Just by continuing what they did here in Drums and Wilkes-Barre … we still have other chapters to write," Sabatino said.
Vesuvio's in Drums opened 19 years ago, and Vesuvio's in Wilkes-Barre that his brother, Donald, manages, has been in business for 13 years. Sabatino expects to find jobs at the other restaurants for most of the workers at the city shop.
When Sabatino walks along North Wyoming Street, he thinks back to other businesses that flourished when he was a teenager. Bob's Sporting Goods, Fierro's Furniture and Merf's Newstand have all closed.
Many of the nostalgic customers who grew up going to the Hazleton restaurants on Friday night after football games at the stadium just up the street have moved to the Conyngham-Drums Valley and are more likely, these days, to go Vesuvio's in Drums.
As the neighborhood changed with immigrants more likely to arrive from the Dominican Republic than Italy, Vesuvio's found new customers.
He and his siblings weren't looking to sell, either.
"We were approached and they made a good offer," said Sabatino, who is glad the restaurant hit the 50-year milestone.
A liquor license application taped on the front window list the new owners as Avanti at Drums.
"I wish the new owners luck in whatever they're doing, but I don't think it's going to be a pizzeria," Sabatino said,
The family is moving the pizza ovens to one another of their locations. The shuffleboard table, purchased from the Battered Mug when that restaurant closed, will go into storage until they find a place for it. The red, white and green sign facing the front walk that says "Vesuvio Italian Restaurant" and depicts a mustachioed chef wearing a white hat will go to the Drums restaurant.
In the days before turning over the key at the end of the month, Sabatino will clear out the residence upstairs, which he calls the museum because it's changed little from when his grandparents lived there.
He tried living there after his grandfather died in 2010, but had to leave after a few months.
The memories were too much.
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This story was originally published April 26, 2025 at 1:08 AM