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A husband-and-wife restaurant that opened on the Upper East Side in 2024 has shut down for good, with one of its owners describing a hard fight to keep the doors open that ultimately couldn’t be won.
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Unregular Pizza, the Roman-style pizzeria at 1132 Lexington Avenue between East 78th and 79th streets, served its last slice on April 18. The closure ends a roughly two-year run for the shop, which moved into a space previously occupied by Farinella when it first opened on the Upper East Side in May 2024.Co-owner Paola Sinisgalli, who moved to New York from Rome in 2010, told Patch that “we tried everything we could to keep it alive, but it just wasn’t working.” She framed the failure as a difficult but inevitable part of small-business reality.
Sinisgalli also wondered aloud whether the shop’s playful 1990s aesthetic — Ninja Turtles imagery, comic books, a stereo, and bright colors throughout the small space — read as a tonal mismatch with the surrounding neighborhood, even as she stood by the food itself. Unregular’s pies are built on a 72-hour dough using ingredients sourced from Italy, and a pastrami pizza had been created specifically for the Upper East Side location.
There was at least one bright spot in the final stretch. Just before the owners made the call to close, they received a wedding invitation from an Upper East Side couple who had gotten engaged at the pizzeria — a proposal made over a slice.
Unregular’s two remaining locations are at Union Square and Essex Market.
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