The Old Forge institution is changing hands, but the incoming owner says we shouldn’t expect any big changes…
There are restaurant sales that feel like endings. Chairs stack. Menus disappear. The lights go dark. And then there are sales that feel more like a handoff; careful, deliberate, meant to keep something intact.
The recent sale of Salerno’s Café on Moosic Road in Old Forge falls squarely into the second category.
After more than ninety years as a fixture in town, Salerno’s has been sold to Jeff Adomiak, a Moosic resident and longtime customer. The transaction marks a generational transition, not a reinvention. The outgoing owners have been open about why they’re stepping away, age, exhaustion, and the reality of running a restaurant for decades, and equally clear about what they want preserved: the food, the room, and the way the place works.
That distinction matters here.
In Old Forge, restaurants don’t operate on a typical business timeline. They run on something closer to family time, measured in birthdays, post-funeral meals, and Friday nights that look exactly like the ones before. The news isn’t that Salerno’s is leaving. It’s that responsibility for it is being passed along.
Why this kind of sale matters in Old Forge…
Old Forge’s reputation as the “Pizza Capital of the World” isn’t built on novelty. It’s built on repetition. Restaurants survive here not by chasing trends, but by refusing to. They make the same pizza, in the same pans, for people who expect it to arrive at the table tasting exactly the way it always has.
Salerno’s has long occupied a particular lane in that ecosystem. It isn’t a destination built for attention or reinvention. It’s a full Italian-American dining room that happens to serve Old Forge–style pizza alongside tripe, sausage in sauce, stuffed peppers, antipasto platters, and porketta sandwiches. The menu hasn’t been learned from reading; it’s been learned by ordering.
When a place like that changes hands, the fear isn’t closure. It’s erosion. Will the sauce change? Will the room feel different? Will the pizza still arrive cut into squares, meant to be shared?
Those questions are always present. What matters is whether they’re taken seriously.
A retirement, not a retreat…
The decision to sell came from realism, not distress. Michael and Terry Lettieri, who have been connected to Salerno’s for more than fifty years, are in their late seventies. Their comments around the sale center on gratitude, pride, and the difficulty of letting go, not on declining business or lost relevance.
That’s an important distinction. Salerno’s wasn’t pushed out. It was handed off.
Terry Lettieri has indicated she’ll remain involved during the transition, helping pass along recipes and day-to-day knowledge. That kind of overlap matters in kitchens where measurements live in muscle memory rather than notebooks. Continuity, in places like this, doesn’t come from instructions. It comes from standing next to someone who’s done it the same way for decades.
The incoming steward…
Adomiak has described himself as local, experienced, and committed to maintaining what works. He’s hinted at a few ideas of his own, but always within the framework of preservation rather than overhaul. Knowing what not to change is often the harder job.
Early community reaction has been positive, bolstered by public support from fellow Old Forge restaurant owner T.J. Cusumano, a small but meaningful signal in a tight-knit food town where reputations travel quickly and quietly.
A room that tells you everything you need to know…
Walk into Salerno’s and the priorities are obvious. The wood-paneled dining room is warmly lit and unpretentious. Framed photos line the walls. The booths show years of use. The room isn’t designed to impress you once; it’s designed to feel familiar every time.
The pizza follows the same logic. Rectangular trays. Thick crust. Red and white styles treated as equals. Cut into squares and set down in the middle of the table. This is Old Forge pizza in its most straightforward form, and any noticeable change would be immediate.
That’s why so much emphasis has been placed on preserving recipes from the start. In a place like this, consistency isn’t a marketing claim. It’s a promise.
More than a restaurant…
The sale includes more than just the dining room. The property also encompasses an apartment above the restaurant and a neighboring building with additional apartments, a reminder that Old Forge food businesses are often deeply entwined with long-term real estate and neighborhood stability.
These places aren’t pop-ups or concepts. They’re anchors.
What comes next?
The question hanging over Salerno’s isn’t whether it will survive. It’s whether it will continue to feel like itself. That’s a higher bar than profitability. It requires restraint, memory, and respect for the expectations built over generations.
If there’s cautious optimism surrounding this sale, it’s because everyone involved seems to understand that responsibility. In Old Forge, success isn’t measured by how much you change. It’s measured by whether the pizza still arrives the way people expect it to, hot, familiar, and exactly the same as last time.
