Sbarro

Sbarro did not begin as a pizza counter. In 1956, Gennaro and Carmela Sbarro emigrated from Naples to the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn and opened a salumeria — an Italian grocery — on 65th Street. It was a neighborhood shop selling neighborhood things, and it stayed that way for over a decade. The pivot that made the name famous came in 1970, when the family opened its first mall-based restaurant at Brooklyn's Kings Plaza Shopping Center. That location turned out to be the whole future of the business.

The timing lined up with the American mall's expansion, and Sbarro arrived with an idea most food courts hadn't had yet. Malls of the era largely sold snacks; Sbarro was among the first to offer full meals, and it became something of a pioneer of mall cuisine. Baked ziti, lasagna, and spaghetti sat alongside the pizza, but the pizza is what people remember — the tray-sized New York-style slabs held behind glass, reheated to order, sold by the slice to a line of people who had been walking around a mall for two hours and could no longer make decisions. At its peak the chain ran more than a thousand locations worldwide.

The fall came in a pair of bankruptcies. Sbarro filed for Chapter 11 on April 4, 2011, and was granted court approval to emerge that November. Less than three years later it filed again, in March 2014, exiting protection on June 2 of that same year. By 2016 there were 318 locations left in the United States. The chain still operates more than 600 restaurants across 28 countries and has been reporting growth again in recent years, from a headquarters in Columbus, Ohio — a long way from a Brooklyn grocery store, and a longer way from the second floor of a mall on a Saturday afternoon.