After two decades feeding downtown Long Beach office workers, bar-goers and World Cup crowds, Broadway Pizza & Grill has closed for good. Owner Mike Rosetti, who opened the restaurant in 2006, pointed to a mix of rising costs, a shrinking customer base and a string of break-ins as the forces that finally ended the run.
The closure leaves four adjacent storefronts vacant on Broadway east of Pine Avenue, according to lbpost.com. Rosetti told the outlet that office and HR catering orders had sustained the business before 2019, but the pandemic permanently altered downtown's daily rhythms, and Broadway Pizza never fully recovered its bottom line after 2020 closures. More people working from home limited the restaurant's customer base long after the initial shutdowns ended, he said, and many of his regular customers simply moved to Orange County, Los Angeles or elsewhere.
Rosetti had hoped that residents from newly built apartments nearby would help sustain the business, but that expectation didn't materialize the way he'd planned. A temporary bump in sales came during World Cup watch parties, one of the events organized by the Downtown Long Beach Alliance, a business improvement district funded partly by permit fees that also puts on art festivals and block parties with legal public drinking. That boost wasn't enough to offset the broader decline.
A SWAT Standoff and Repeated Break-Ins
Security wasn't just a background worry for Rosetti. In 2025, SWAT officers spent hours searching Broadway Pizza for an armed robbery suspect who had tunneled in from a neighboring 7-Eleven, looting cash from the register before evading arrest and walking out unnoticed. The restaurant's own footage helped point investigators toward the suspect, and Long Beach police announced roughly a month later that they'd made an arrest, per the same outlet's reporting.
That incident was just one entry on a longer list of trouble. Broadway Pizza experienced five break-ins during its final 18 months in business, according to the report, compounding rising food, labor and insurance costs that were already squeezing the operation. In one particularly frustrating episode, contractors hired by the local business improvement district powerwashed the sidewalk from the outside in, pushing dirty water into the restaurant itself.
Downtown's Vacancy Problem Runs Deeper
Broadway Pizza's closure fits into a much larger pattern. Downtown Long Beach's commercial vacancy rate reached 35.3% this month, a record high driven by remote work, high interest rates and safety concerns tied to the unhoused population, according to the Los Angeles Times. Regional office vacancy data from Kidder Mathews put Downtown Long Beach's direct vacancy at 18.1% and total available space at 23.4% for the second quarter of 2026, compared with 16.4% across Los Angeles County overall — figures that translate directly into fewer weekday lunches and less catering business for restaurants like Rosetti's.
Pinkberry, located on Broadway near Pine Avenue, closed earlier this year after more than a decade in the neighborhood, another sign of the turnover working its way through the corridor. Meanwhile, San Diego-based chicken-wing chain Dirty Birds is preparing to move in across the street from Broadway Pizza, a shift Hoodline reported when the chain signed its Pine Avenue lease. Similar reshuffling has hit The Promenade, where fast-casual chain Pastaphony took over the former Ubuntu Cafe space, and Five Guys pulled out of four California locations in May, including two in Los Angeles County, citing post-pandemic operating costs.
City Bets on Entertainment and Institutional Anchors
City and port officials are trying to counter the vacancy trend with big infrastructure moves rather than office tenants. Long Beach opened its waterfront shorefront amphitheater in June, an 11,000-seat venue intended to draw visitors and spending downtown. Around the same time, the Port of Long Beach acquired the 13-story Oceangate office tower for $36 million as part of its AnchorLB initiative to repurpose vacant downtown commercial real estate, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Austin Metoyer, president and CEO of the Downtown Long Beach Alliance, said Broadway Pizza had been a longtime fixture in the neighborhood. He compared its run to that of Mum's Restaurant, which anchored Pine Avenue from the late 1980s through the mid-2000s before it, too, closed.
What Comes Next for Rosetti
Rosetti has worked in the downtown Long Beach neighborhood since 1992, when he was mentored into the hospitality industry by John Morris, who now owns Boathouse on the Bay in Long Beach. Morris described Rosetti as “a hell of a worker,” adding that he ran a great operation with great food and pizzas. Over the years, Rosetti remodeled Broadway Pizza three times, and the restaurant offered a full bar alongside sit-down dining, distinguishing it from the fast-casual concepts now filling nearby storefronts.
Rosetti plans to shift his focus to Rossmoor Donuts & Coffee in Los Alamitos, which he runs with his girlfriend. For a corridor still absorbing the loss of Pinkberry and bracing for more turnover, Broadway Pizza's exit marks the end of one of downtown's longer-running sit-down restaurants at a moment when the neighborhood's future increasingly hinges on concerts, catering deals and institutional investment rather than the office lunch crowd that once filled its tables.
