A downtown Durham restaurant known for serving delicate wood-fired pizzas with kitchen shears tucked under the crust will close permanently next month due to an imminent and exorbitant rent increase.
In a Monday release, Pompieri Pizza owner Seth Gross wrote that the restaurant’s landlord is primed to up the rent by more than 100 percent come January.
“We have not been able to successfully negotiate a reasonable next term,” Gross wrote. “This is simply not sustainable.”
Gross’s other two restaurants, Bull City Burger and Brewery and Bull City Solera and Taproom, will remain open. It’s unclear whether Bull City Burger and Brewery, which shares a landlord with Pompieri and is located in the same historic Rogers Alley complex, will face the rent increase that was imposed on Pompieri. Northpond Partners and Loden Properties bought the Rogers Alley site in 2021 for just over $6 million.
Gross was not immediately available for comment, though, by way of necessary disclosure, this reporter spent nearly two years as an employee of his restaurants and can imagine how painful this decision must have been.
Pompieri Pizza opened in 2013 in a steepled brick-red building that once housed Durham’s Fire Station No. 1. The restaurant was designed to reflect the history of the space, with a name that translates to “firefighter” in Italian and a cuisine that, subversively, requires the constant stoking of a blaze.
Menu items also nodded to local history. The popular sausage-topped, beer-crusted “Drunken Horse” pizza was named after a firefighting horse from the original station who—the story goes—once took a few sips of beer, ascended the stairs, and got stuck on the second floor.
Pompieri’s rigid adherence to Neapolitan style has made it a go-to spot for traditionalists looking for charred crusts and house-stretched mozz. That said, the restaurant’s handful of unorthodox toppings, like dairy-free cheese and Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies, have impressively retained two notoriously hard-to-please customer demographics: vegans and children.
In a town where most every new business brands itself as funky and local, Pompieri’s closure will mark the loss of a restaurant that truly earned those labels: a restaurant that grew its own basil using an aquaponic fish tank system; a restaurant that awarded a year’s worth of free pizza to whomever could recite the most decimals of pi by memory; and a restaurant that featured a quote from the Triangle’s own independent weekly newspaper on the wall, painted in a bold black font:
“Pizza should arrive as if by dumbwaiter from the pits of hell. It should be charred, blistered, gnarled and smoky. It should not merely be hot, but seem racked—tortured—by heat.”
The quote is pulled from former INDY food critic David A. Ross’s glowing 2014 review. Pompieri didn’t include the next part of the review in its wall blurb, so I’ll leave you with that here.
“Pompieri’s pizza,” Ross wrote, “approximates this ideal more closely than any pizza in the Triangle.”
Pompieri’s last day will be Sunday, December 10.
Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on Twitter or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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