One of the Triangle’s top pizzerias will close soon, but there’s time for one last pie
Five years after opening, one of the Triangle’s most unique pizzerias will shut down next month.
Chef Teddy Diggs left the world of fine dining to open Coronato Pizza in Carrboro. The pizzeria focused on a thin kind of Roman style pizza and classic toppings, plus popular mozzarella croquettes and one of the area’s only spirit-free cocktail programs.
Diggs announced the closing Monday in a social media post. The last day of service looks to be about a month away, with Coronato continuing to serve pizzas and dishes until Oct. 15.
Dispute with neighbor
The closing announcement alludes to “significant health and safety concerns” that the restaurant is working through, but doesn’t mention a neighboring cigar shop specifically.
As reported earlier this year in The News & Observer, Coronato has been in a months-long dispute with its neighbor in the South Green Shopping Center.
In April, Diggs filed a lawsuit against the cigar bar Oasis Cigar Lounge and the shopping center’s owner Woodhill NC, LLC, arguing that secondhand smoke had harmed Coronato’s business.
Since February, Coronato has operated as takeout-only over concerns about secondhand smoke, the lawsuit says.
From fine dining to pizza
Diggs said in the closing post that the restaurant couldn’t survive solely on takeout.
“Though our efforts to mitigate the challenge and transition to a take-out only service model were in good faith, it was not meant to be a sustainable solution,” the Instagram post reads. “Instead, we were hoping for a temporary fix until the challenging circumstances could be resolved. We have since exhausted ourselves, and our resources, while waiting for a solution that never came.”
Before Coronato, Diggs had been executive chef at the fine-dining Chapel Hill restaurant Il Palio, serving refined Italian dishes in a dark and romantic dining room.
Diggs then left the restaurant to open Coronato, inspired by trips to Italy and the pizza of Rome.
When Coronato opened, former News & Observer dining critic Greg Cox named it one of the best new restaurants to open in 2019. The next year he named it among the Triangle’s best pizzerias.
In an interview Monday, Diggs said the lawsuit is still pending, with the parties having recently wrapped up the discovery phase.
Diggs said he made the closing announcement a month ahead of time to give the restaurant’s staff time to look for jobs and for diners to consider stopping in.
“We wanted this to be a good place to work and for us to offer the best food we could, the best service we could,” Diggs said in an interview. “Hopefully people can find some time to support us and have some pizza in the next month.”
