Green Cove's Unique Pizza Joint Being Sold
Green Cove's Unique Pizza Joint Being Sold
D'Fontana's Preparing for a Transition, Including Its Secret-Sauce Recipes
D’Fontana Pizzeria & Ristorante, the closest thing to fine dining in Green Cove Springs, is being sold, staff members have confirmed. The restaurant first opened at Jacksonville Beach in 1998 and moved to Green Cove in 2008.
Since then, D’Fontana’s has been remarkable for its ability to bring rednecks, carpetbaggers and everybody in between to sit together at its 10 closely spaced inside tables (or to pick up pizzas to go).
There are three other pizza joints in Green Cove, but only D’Fontana’s is not part of a restaurant chain. Pizza snobs from Yankeeland used to say, “There’s no good pizza south of Jersey,” but members of that clan are perfectly happy with D’Fontana’s interpretation of a New York-style pie. The restaurant’s real distinguishing feature is elsewhere on the menu, however.
Various Italian sauce entrees such as a la Francese, Picatta and Marsala—they are the dishes that support the fine-dining reference that began this story (certainly not the modest decor). The assumption might be that the owners were an Italian-American restaurant family named D’Fontana, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, ethnically and geographically speaking.
The place is owned by the Daswatta family, originally from Sri Lanka, an island nation off India that used to be called Ceylon. According to staff, the owner is going into retirement.
There is an online business-for-sale listing for a pizza restaurant in Clay County that does not mention D’Fontana or Green Cove by name, but its description fits D’Fontana’s to a tee, right down to the year it opened and “3 beer signs, 10 tables, 38 chairs, wall pictures, 3 TVs, 3 bar stools.”
“The staff are seasoned, trained and have been there for years,” the listing reads, and that is certainly true about D’Fontana’s crew.
According to the listing, the asking price was $325,000 with gross annual revenue of $661,000 and $107,496 in cash flow. The rent is $2,400 a month, and the lease runs through 2025.
Also, according to the listing, the seller has committed to spending two weeks with new owners for training, which may actually be spent teaching them how to make the various sautés. Over the years, D’Fontana’s owners have treated their sauté recipes like the nuclear codes, to the point of not offering Marsala or Piccata dishes on nights when the owner could not be present to make them.
