Eight-year-old Joey Yerardi broke out in tears when his father told him the news.
"He was like, 'I wanted to run that some day'," said Fran Yerardi, a longtime Newton resident who's closed Yerardi's Restaurant after 16 years on Watertown Street.
Since 1992, Yerardi and his wife, Andrea, have fostered a fiercely loyal clientele with authentic-but-affordable Italian cuisine served in a homey second-floor dining room, complete with brick fireplace, fake ivy and black-and-white photos of the Yerardi clan.
But after decades in the restaurant business, the Yerardi family served up its last chicken parmagiana Saturday.
Fran Yerardi insists business is still strong - he just wants to spend more time with his family and his real estate business.
"It's bittersweet because we don't have to go, but when do you pull the trigger?" Yerardi said. "I'd rather go out when we're on top, rather than let it start to slip."
Yerardi said he nearly changed his mind as he went from one employee to another breaking the news. Many of them, including his bar manager and office manager, will start working for Yerardi's real estate business, while his chef, who has worked at the restaurant since the day it opened, plans to retire.
Yerardi admits he'll miss the chaos of the restaurant.
"I'll probably be bored out of my mind," he said. "I am going to miss the action."
The Yerardis have been in the restaurant business for years, starting with a malt shop in West Newton Square. Like his son, Fran Yerardi knew he wanted to manage a restaurant since a young age.
But of his eight brothers and sisters, he was the only one who went into the family business.
"I liked the action," Yerardi said as he gestured to the packed tables in the other room. "Even right now, it's crazy out there - I love it."
After college, Fran took over managing his father's Yerardi's Restaurant in Halifax. But with his parents growing older, Fran Yerardi eventually decided to open up a shop closer to the family's longtime Newton home.
Around that time, Yerardi was approached by Joe Bianchi, a friend and owner of J.B.'s Steak House, about a piece of property on Watertown Street. Yerardi seized the opportunity and opened the restaurant in 1992.
As the business grew, Yerardi decided to build a bocce ball court on the restaurant balcony. Yerardi said the game, which challenges players to toss a heavy bocce ball as close as possible to the smaller "pallino" ball, is "fuel for the Italian pastime of arguing."
To get his customers interested, Yerardi organized a 10-week bocce tournament with a major payout: $10,000 if a player could get their bocce close enough to "kiss" the pallino. Yerardi called it the "hole-in-one" of bocce.
"I said, 'Let's do something crazy with it to get people to know about it'," Yerardi said.
Yerardi had no idea how well the gimmick would work. When a young customer unexpectedly won the $10,000 pot, word spread and newspapers picked up the story. Soon, Fox News was reporting on Yerardi's bocce tournament.
The restaurant has hosted the tournament every year since, but no one has won the $10,000 prize again.
As business boomed, Yerardi began investing revenue from the restaurant into other ventures. In the mid-1990s, he and his wife opened a gourmet takeout restaurant in Waban called La Cocina, and later took over food and beverage services for the Newton Sheraton Hotel.
He also began investing in real estate. About four years after Yerardi's opened, Fran began buying up nearby houses as they came on the market.
"Any neighbor that would complain about the noise, I'd buy up their house," he joked.
In May 2006, Yerardi opened the first New England franchise of HomeVestors, a real estate firm that specialized in flipping unappealing or foreclosed homes for a profit. According to their bright yellow billboards, the company gladly buys "ugly houses."
As more and more homes head to the auction block, Yerardi has found that his real estate business was hotter than his restaurant business.
"We got to the point where the restaurant wasn't our main source of income," he said. "We still loved it, we still kept it, but we weren't killing ourselves over it."
And could there be another Yerardi's in the future?
"Let's put it this way - I'm not throwing out my customer list," Fran said.
There's another reason Yerardi's may not be gone for good. Joey, Yerardi's 8-year-old son, has made a pact with his cousin that if his father doesn't open another restaurant, they will.
"It's in their blood," said Andrea Yarardi, Joey's mother. "There might be another Yerardi's."
Neal Simpson can be reached at nsimpson@cnc.com.
