Following landlord dispute, Pentimento restaurant in Stony Brook will close after 27 years

A long-standing Stony Brook restaurant is slated to close Sept. 30 and local diners are up in arms. A customer-generated "Save Pentimento," petition gathered more than 3,000 names to "join us in our efforts to thwart this attempt to dismantle all that we love about our town and this restaurant."

Owners Dennis Young and Lisa Cusumano said Pentimento is closing because they are unable to extend their lease in the Stony Brook Village Center where the Italian restaurant has operated since 1994. In a Facebook post, they thanked their "loyal patrons and wonderful staff for all the support they have given us over the last 27 years."

Neither Young, the chef, nor Cusumano, the managing partner, intended to run the restaurant indefinitely. Their plan was to sell their lease to new owners who would keep the Pentimento name and, most importantly Young and Cusumano said, the staff.

Selling an existing lease to new operators is a common practice among restaurant owners; self-employed and without pensions, their retirements often depend on receiving so-called "key money" for allowing the new operators to assume the remainder of the lease.

When Pentimento’s lease with Eagle Realty, which owns the Village Center, came up for renewal last year, Cusumano said "we were not focusing on the lease. We were in the middle of a pandemic; we were just struggling to survive."

After temporarily closing in spring 2020, Pentimento pivoted from fine dining to takeout. Young, who was semiretired, returned to helm the kitchen. In August, the couple responded to changing customer needs by turning the main dining room into a marketplace selling groceries and prepared foods, and said they were able to hire back 20 of the 45 people they had laid off. At the time, the existing lease was amended to accommodate the new business plan, but neither party brought up an extension.

Earlier this year, Cusumano and Young found a group of investors who wanted to take over Pentimento and presented them to Eagle Realty. The board met with them and looked at their proposal. Gloria Rocchio, the board’s president, said that other candidates were also interviewed.

"It was not our intention to kick out an existing tenant," she said, "but the tenant wanted to move on. We had to look at what other tenants are out there. We were looking for the most qualified, most experienced person possible to take over the spot."

Regarding the protests, Rocchio said, "the general public doesn't have all the facts; they only have one side of the story."

In late July, Cusumano said Eagle Realty notified them that Pentimento’s chosen successors would not be able to assume the lease. She and her partner are disappointed that they will walk away without selling the lease but, she said, "we will survive. What's most disappointing is that our staff will lose their jobs and the community will be without Pentimento."

Young added that he is encouraging people who hold Pentimento gift cards to come to the restaurant to redeem them before Sept. 30. "We don’t want to be one of those places that closes in the middle of the night. We will walk away proud."