Restaurant news: Beloved Ormond Beach restaurant says goodbye, but its pizza stays

Super Mario’s Pizza, known for its homemade menu of hand-tossed pizzas, ranging from the Aloha, Sicilian and BBQ chicken to the meat lovers, veggie and Margherita, announced on social media earlier this month that it would be saying goodbye after less than one year in business — but its pizzas would be sticking around.

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After opening its doors in Ormond Beach in May, the local pizza shop, though receiving stellar reviews online, struggled to maintain consistent traffic over the last several months. With no indoor seating or full-time delivery service available, the eatery struggled to fully accommodate customers’ dining needs.

“A lot of people would call up and say, you know, we want a table for so and so, and we can’t put tables in there, and that was our biggest downfall — I didn’t have a dine-in option,” owner Mario Recupido said. “So, I couldn’t get it to meet what I needed it to.”

The eatery informed the community in a Facebook post, however, that disheartened customers wouldn't have to say goodbye to their favorite offerings forever, noting that the beloved pizza shop will merge with Little Italy’s Ristorante in Daytona Beach, which will continue to serve the same pizza selections.

Recupido opened Little Italy’s in October 2021, and he noted that the Daytona Beach favorite, a much larger project, took priority over his Ormond Beach venture. Little Italy's serves every meat-layered, meatless and sauce-smothered pizza that customers know and love at Super Mario’s Pizza, among various other menu options.

“I couldn’t do two things at once — it was overbearing,” Recupido said. “This restaurant is exactly the same recipes as Super Mario’s, there’s no difference. We have more stuff here, like veal parmesan, antipastos … it was just better to invest more here than to keep focusing over there.”

Where Super Mario’s fell short, Little Italy’s has succeeded, offering customers both indoor and outdoor seating with more than 180 seats available, as well as providing live music, karaoke, to-go ordering, catering and the same quality, consistency and homemade offerings that have made the eatery a Daytona Beach go-to over the last two years.

Known, much like its previous Ormond Beach counterpart, for its fresh ingredients and authentic Italian dishes, Little Italy’s Ristorante offers a packed menu of sauce-smothered and cheese-coated plates and pies, from the Lasagna Della Nonna and filet mignon-topped Rague Della Domenica, to the prosciutto arugula, chicken bacon BBQ and broccoli rabe pizzas.

According to Recupido, his Daytona Beach eatery offers a greater selection of Italian cuisine, from its pizzas and pastas to its wines and desserts, that customers new and returning can indulge in, whether enjoying a romantic sit-down dinner for two, a lunch-break slice to go, or a family feast out on the eatery's light-strung patio.

“Every one of our sauces is made homemade from scratch,” Recupido said. “Mom’s homemade sauce — we sell it by the jar. We hand-roll our own meatballs, we pound out our veal and chicken and hand-bread it all, and we slice our eggplant to order. All of our dough is homemade — and we don’t put sugar in our dough. We have meat sauce and a non-meat sauce for people that don’t eat meat. We just have a much wider variety here.”

Little Italy’s Ristorante is located at 240 Beach St. in Daytona Beach and is open 11:30 a.m. – 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. - 10 p.m. Friday, noon - 10 p.m. Saturday, and 1 p.m. – 9 p.m. Sunday. For information, call 386-265-4778 or visit littleitalysrestaurantandpizzaria.com.

Helena Perray is the restaurant and dining writer for The Daytona Beach News-Journal. A New Jersey native and passionate storyteller, she can be contacted at hperray@gannett.com. Follow her on Instagram and Facebook. Support local journalism by subscribing

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Ormond Beach pizza shop permanently closes doors