The pizzeria and Italian market opened July 8 after a 27 month buildout, with a trattoria and bar phase still to come. A CNY Signal calculation puts the storefront’s vacancy at 1,368 days.
Paul Messina spent the morning of Wednesday, July 8 doing something nobody had done at 408 E. Genesee St. in Fayetteville in 1,368 days: serving customers. That is how long the building that housed Kirby’s Grill and Taphouse for decades sat dark, from the restaurant’s last service on Oct. 9, 2022 until Apizza Alimentari opened its doors this summer.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
Get the next one, plus overnight incidents, in your inbox at 6 AM. Free, no spam.
“We’ve been very, very fortunate,” Messina told the Eagle Bulletin the week after opening. “We’ve gotten such a wonderful, humbling, welcoming response from the community.”
Messina did not arrive alone. His partners in the new Roman style cafe, bakery and market are John Stage, the co-founder of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, and baker Amy Chrisogonou. Together the three have turned one of the village’s most familiar restaurant addresses into something Fayetteville has not had before: a paneteria and pizzeria that starts pouring espresso at 6:30 a.m. and hands over focaccia sandwiches and rectangular Roman pizza until 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.
The address matters as much as the menu. E. Genesee Street is Route 5, the old east west spine that carries commuters between the eastern suburbs and Syracuse, and the 400 block sits at the heart of the village’s commercial strip. When a building there goes dark for years, everyone driving to work sees it twice a day. When the lights come back on, everyone notices that too.
Fifty years of one restaurant, then nothing
The address carries more history than most storefronts in Onondaga County. The building opened in October 1972 as a Mr. Steak franchise, according to the Eagle Bulletin’s reporting at the time of Kirby’s closure. It was renamed Kirby’s in the early 1990s, trading under a logo that swapped the apostrophe for a gold star.
When Kirby’s shut down on Oct. 9, 2022, it had reached 50 years of continuous restaurant service at the site, on the dot. Longtime manager Charles Kauffman, who started there 34 years earlier as a dishwasher while attending Fayetteville-Manlius High School, blamed the twin squeezes that hit independent restaurants after 2020. “Since the pandemic, everything’s been an issue with getting the quality food products we want to serve and then trying to get employees to work the restaurant,” Kauffman told the Eagle at the time. The closure left the chain’s Westvale Plaza location in Syracuse as the last Kirby’s still operating, and it left Fayetteville without a dining room that had hosted the village’s birthdays and holiday dinners for two generations.
What followed was a long vacancy in the middle of a village of 4,225 people, per the 2020 Census. WSYR-TV’s Your Stories team, which tracked the property through its transition, reported that the building’s owner fielded interest from several restaurants, a pediatric urgent care and a call center before choosing a restaurant tenant. The property later sold, and businessman Bill Cleary, together with architect Joseph Piciucco of Unique Development Companies, took on a renovation of the plaza itself, a structure WSYR reported to be nearly 60 years old. The scope Cleary described to the station covered a new roof, facade improvements and a gutted interior.
The Dinosaur connection
For Syracuse food watchers, the names behind the counter are the story inside the story. Stage co-founded Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, which opened its first restaurant in 1988 on Willow Street in downtown Syracuse and grew into a six location chain, adding Rochester in 1998, Harlem in 2004, Troy in 2010, Brooklyn in 2013 and Buffalo in 2014. Messina, a longtime Stage collaborator who runs the day to day at their pizzeria, joined him to open Apizza Regionale, the wood fired Neapolitan spot at 260 W. Genesee St. in downtown Syracuse, in 2016, a block from where the original Dinosaur got its start.
Fayetteville is the pair’s first move into the eastern suburbs, and it comes with a different playbook. Where Apizza Regionale leans on Naples, the new spot leans on Rome. The signature is pizza al taglio, the rectangular, crisp crusted pizza sold by the cut that Romans treat as street food, baked in an electric oven imported from Italy rather than Apizza Regionale’s wood fired domes. Syracuse.com’s first look reported the broader ambition: a menu built to celebrate all 20 regions of Italy across food, wine, pastry and coffee.
Chrisogonou, the third partner, runs the bakery and culinary program, per the project’s 2024 announcement. Her morning case is the reason the doors open at 6:30 a.m.: croissants, breads and pastries baked on site, alongside espresso, macchiatos, cappuccinos, cold brew and other European coffee drinks. By midday the same room shifts into a salumeria serving Roman focaccia sandwiches stacked with cured and roasted meats and artisanal cheeses, plus whole pizzas and those rectangular cuts by the slice.
Ownership told the Eagle Bulletin the name is meant to signal a gathering place, an open air market feel for Italian food done well. Messina put it more plainly to WSYR before opening, calling the project a neighborhood keystone of the best Italian food, part cafe, part market, pizzeria and trattoria in one.
Why the opening took 817 days
Patience was the price of admission. Don Cazentre of This is CNY and NYup.com first reported the project on April 12, 2024, when the partners had just signed their lease and expected roughly a year of buildout. The opening arrived 817 days later.
The slippage was gradual. By a January 2, 2026 update from WSYR, the target had moved to early March 2026, with Messina pointing to the wait for higher end finishes and specialty equipment, including that imported Italian oven. March came and went. The Facebook announcement that finally stuck named July 8 for breakfast and lunch service, and the restaurant hit that date.
The timing puts Apizza Alimentari at the front of a two stage opening. What is running now is the daytime operation. Still to come, in the following weeks, is the full service Roman trattoria: an evening restaurant with a cocktail bar, Italian wines, negronis and an aperitivo hour of wine, cocktails and appetizers. The Eagle Bulletin reported the owners plan to keep expanding hours until the address works as an all day restaurant serving dinner, which would return 408 E. Genesee St. to the role it played for the Kirby’s generation: a village dinner destination.
A big summer for a small village core
The opening lands in the middle of an unusually busy season for Fayetteville’s 1.73 square miles. A few blocks west of the new restaurant, Onondaga County crews spent the spring rebuilding the Limestone Plaza bridge over Limestone Creek. The village posted notice of the closure, which began March 23, 2026 and shut the stretch between Mill Street and the entrance to Canal Landing Park while the bridge deck was replaced and the approach roadway rebuilt, with completion targeted for mid July. The notice promised that Canal Landing Park and the plaza’s businesses would stay open and reachable through detours for the duration. Limestone Plaza itself is a National Register listed historic district in the lower village, the kind of place where, as the village’s own page puts it, it is common to see people fishing off the bridge.
The plaza has also been the village’s summer stage. The Onondaga East Chamber, in coordination with the village, has been throwing monthly Party in the Plaza events along Brooklea Drive with food trucks, vendor booths and live music. The first of three this summer fell on June 19, the same day a tornado watch covered the area, and the party went on anyway. The second ran July 16 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., eight days after Apizza Alimentari’s debut and within walking distance of it.
None of this is new territory for a village that has been reinventing its main street since before the Civil War. Fayetteville was first settled in 1792 and incorporated in 1844, and its commercial bones were built by industries that came and went: the L. and J.G. Stickley furniture company operated in the village from 1900 to 1985, and a young Grover Cleveland got his elementary schooling at the Fayetteville Academy before his road to the White House. The pattern holds. Buildings outlast their tenants here, and the interesting question is always who moves in next.
Village Hall has its own project running. Fayetteville is rewriting its zoning code for the first time in a generation. The zoning committee held a public open house at the Center for Active Adults on May 6, 2026, then presented a working draft of the new code to the Village Board of Trustees on June 22. Before any adoption, the board must complete a State Environmental Quality Review, refer the draft to Onondaga County Planning and hold additional public comment. The full draft ordinance, zoning map, use table and dimensional regulations are on paper at three spots in the village: Village Hall, the Fayetteville Free Library and the Center for Active Adults. Whatever code emerges will govern the next reinvention of buildings like the one Apizza Alimentari just filled.
The next date on the calendar
For now, the measure of the project is a full parking lot on weekend mornings and a case that sells out of croissants. The harder test comes when the lights stay on past 4 p.m. Messina and Stage have done the two act opening before: Apizza Regionale spent its first months proving a lunch crowd before downtown Syracuse treated it as a dinner room.
The bar buildout is the last piece of construction inside a property that has now seen a half century as a steakhouse and grill, 1,368 days of vacancy and a top to bottom renovation. When the aperitivo hour finally pours its first negroni, the wait will have been measured in weeks. Fayetteville has already proven it can handle the longer kind.
Sources & Verification
Eagle Bulletin (eaglenewsonline.com), “Apizza Alimentari opens in Fayetteville,” Jason Klaiber, July 17, 2026. Eagle Bulletin, “Kirby’s closes its doors in Fayetteville,” October 11, 2022. Eagle Bulletin, “Monthly Fayetteville plaza parties continuing through summer,” Jason Klaiber, July 2, 2026. This is CNY / NYup.com, “Coming next week: Apizza Alimentari to open in Fayetteville after nearly 2 years in the making,” July 2, 2026. This is CNY / NYup.com, “Owners of Syracuse’s Apizza Regionale plan to bring Roman-style food and dining to Fayetteville,” Don Cazentre, April 12, 2024. WSYR-TV localsyr.com Your Stories reports on the former Kirby’s property, including the January 2, 2026 update. Syracuse.com first look coverage of Apizza Alimentari, July 2026. Village of Fayetteville (fayettevilleny.gov): zoning code update news flash (updated June 17, 2026), Limestone Plaza bridge closure notice (March 2026) and Limestone Plaza parks page. US Census Bureau 2020 Census via Wikipedia, Fayetteville, New York. Wikipedia, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. Reporter: Mike Rivera. Edited by: the CNY Signal news team. Published: August 4, 2026.
