The very first Mario’s restau­rant is be­ing closed to the pub­lic tem­porar­i­ly.

In a no­tice post­ed to their so­cial me­dia yes­ter­day, the pop­u­lar piz­za chain con­firmed that its branch at Val­park Shop­ping Plaza would be closed for ren­o­va­tions.

The post stat­ed, “Please note that our Val­park restau­rant is tem­porar­i­ly closed for ren­o­va­tions, we’re work­ing to bring you an en­hanced ex­pe­ri­ence. We ap­pre­ci­ate your un­der­stand­ing and ea­ger­ly an­tic­i­pate wel­com­ing you back in March 2024!”

The post ad­vised cus­tomers to vis­it its near­est lo­ca­tion at Aranguez, re­fer­ring to the branch at the re­cent­ly opened Xtra Plaza which was opened to the pub­lic in De­cem­ber.

The first Mario’s restau­rant was opened in Val­park in June 1972. It had been ini­tial­ly opened as a deli, but Richard Har­ford, bet­ter known as “Slice”, founder, own­er and man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Mario’s Pizze­ria was con­vinced to start serv­ing and ul­ti­mate­ly fo­cus­ing on piz­za lead­ing to the cre­ation of Trinidad’s first piz­za par­lour.

Mario’s now has over 22 branch­es around the coun­try, with the com­pa­ny al­so open­ing restau­rants in Guyana and St Vin­cent while the com­pa­ny al­so an­nounced plans on its web­site to ex­pand to To­ba­go and South Amer­i­ca.