CLEARWATER — At Capogna’s Dugout, the regulars didn’t need menus. Melinda Sue Riddle’s late husband always ordered extra meatballs. Her late mother-in-law went for the pizza burger. Year after year, in the same booths under the same crowded walls of sports memorabilia, whole families ran the same routine. They ordered the wings, or the garlic toast with cheese, or the pizza some swore was the best in town.
After 53 years, the routine is over.
Capogna’s Dugout, the Italian restaurant and sports hangout on Gulf to Bay Boulevard, closed for good June 26. The owners announced it in a Facebook post and ran the final two days on a short menu of pizza, wings, pasta and salads. They did not say why.
“Over the last 53 years we have loved sharing our lives with you,” the post read, “and loved being with you all through all of your milestones.”
The Capogna family opened the restaurant at 1653 Gulf to Bay Blvd. in March 1973, not long after coming down from Michigan. It seated nearly 300 across two dining rooms, the walls a packed scrapbook of local teams and familiar faces. For much of Clearwater, the Dugout came to feel less like a business than a fixture. It was the place you went after the Little League game, the beer-league softball game, the graduation, the funeral.
Eric Mastro’s family moved to town in the ’60s, around the same time as the Capognas. according to a comment he wrote on Facebook. His father, Steve Mastro Sr., and Art Capogna became close friends. Art stopped by the elder Mastro’s auto body shop nearly every day, and when Capogna died, Mastro helped carry his casket.
“It’s truly a shame,” Eric Mastro wrote, but “the memories of my childhood at Capogna’s will always be with me.”
Those memories tend to run down through generations. Riddle’s family had eaten there since the ’70s, she also commented on Facebook, and took her on one of her first outings after she moved to Clearwater in 1994; her daughter grew up at the same tables. Chad Michael’s great-grandmother, Josephine Garvano, refused to eat anywhere else. Graduations, holidays and ordinary nights all happened at Capogna’s.
The Dugout had already said goodbye once.
Hurricanes Helene and Milton knocked out its power in the fall of 2024 and cost the restaurant thousands of dollars in spoiled food and ruined equipment. The family announced it would close for good. “Our dynasty is gone,” longtime owner Al Capogna recalled thinking.
Then it came back. In the spring of 2025, former Monty’s Pizzeria owner Sean Stoffel partnered with the Capogna siblings to reopen the place largely untouched — same menu, most of the same staff. Al Capogna stayed on as an adviser. His brother kept making the sauce and the dough. Third-generation customers were walking back through the door.
That second life lasted about a year.
The goodbyes came fast online. Mayor Bruce Rector thanked the family “for the many years of great food and memories.” Pinellas County Commissioner Chris Latvala thanked them for “the wonderful memories and food.” Greg Frye, a former Clearwater High and Florida State offensive lineman, wrote: “So many memories shared with the Capognas. God bless you all as you move on.”
No one measured the place in years quite like Katy Barber Mize. A Clearwater High teacher who played on the school’s 1997 and 2000 state champion volleyball teams, she grew up at the Dugout and spent its last year working there. Across the dining room, she watched her son, Jack, come up the way a lot of kids did — from a squirmy toddler watching cartoons on a server’s phone, to a kid working quarters out of the claw machine, to a teenager washing dishes and backing her up behind the bar.
Barber Mize worked her final shift June 26. She managed, she wrote, to “only ugly cry once.”
Al Capogna, she added, “made everyone feel like a ‘big deal’ every time they walked in the door, whether he knew you or not.”
“It was a special kind of place,” she wrote, “that could never be replicated.”