Paul Bass Photo
Ian Christmann Photo
Paul Bass Photo
Fire inspector Tomas Reyes Jr. (at right) speaks with Abate's staffers Regi Corona, Carolina Hernandez, and Isaac Cerezo at the scene.
Regi Corona was sauteeing chicken in the kitchen of Abate’s Apizza & Restaurant Thursday when someone shouted, “There’s a fire!”
Corona, a chef at the mainstay eatery on Wooster Street in New Haven’s Little Italy section, raced for a fire extinguisher. He rushed to the pizza oven and tried to put out the flames.
“The fire was coming on too strong,” he said later as he sat outside the restaurant and watched 60 New Haven firefighters take care of the blaze.
Paul Bass Photos
Corona (pictured above) made it out of the restaurant safely, as did the other employees as well as a group of four who were eating a meal inside.
The fire began at Abate’s around 2:15 p.m.
According to Louis Abate, who has run the restaurant for 31 years, the flue pipe to the oven overheated and the oven caught fire.
“It happened twice in Orange,” at a restaurant he runs there as well, a distraught Abate said from inside his Cadillac parked in the restaurant lot as he watched the firefighters working. “So we had a triple wall insulated duct put in. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Abate was in the basement at the time. Sam Ferrer (pictured), who was working upstairs, said as soon as he smelled the smoke he ran downstairs to inform the boss so he could escape.
No firefighters or employees were injured in the fire, according to NHFD Battalion Chief Ryan DiVito. He said the damage inside the restaurant was extensive. It also damaged an apartment in the building where Louis Abate lives with his wife, who was in the course of flying back to New Haven from Florida when Thursday’s fire broke out.
“It was definitely difficult” to battle the fire, DiVito said. “These older buildings, a lot of times they put rain roofs on or cosmetic [changes]. Once it gets above the old roof into that void space,” finding and extinguishing all the flames becomes trickier.
Indeed, an hour after first arriving and getting the flames under control, firefighters were still prying apart the roof seeking hidden hot spots.
DiVito said firefighters found two birds in cages safe in the basement.
The building’s owners, Domenic and Ralph Liuzzi, said they’re covered by insurance. “As long as no one got hurt,” Ralph said, “that’s the important thing.”
