The Pizzeria's Babylon Village location turned its ovens back on Tuesday, a little more than a month after part of the kitchen floor gave way and forced the Main Street storefront to close without warning.

The shop at 217 East Main Street went dark on July 16. In its announcement that day, the company told customers the location was temporarily closed after an unforeseen incident, that the repair meant fixing flooring and replacing the pizza ovens, and that the important thing was that nobody had been hurt. On Monday night the company posted a two minute video with a four word caption announcing that Babylon comes back Tuesday.

For a village that treats its Main Street as a living room, a month and two days is a long time to walk past paper on the windows and wonder.

What actually happened

The failure was under the kitchen, in the section that carries the heaviest equipment in the building. Pizza ovens are the anchor of any slice shop, and they are also the reason a flooring problem there is never a quick patch: the ovens had to come out, the structure below had to be rebuilt, and new ovens had to go in and be brought up to temperature before a single pie could be sold. That is why a repair that might close an office for a week closed a pizzeria for a month.

The company said from the first day that no one was injured, which, given that the floor failed in the busiest room of the building, is the fact worth leading with.

Takeout and catering orders placed with the Babylon shop did not vanish into the closure. The company routed them to its nearby kitchens, with Bay Shore and Lindenhurst both a short drive away, and told affected customers its team would reach out directly.

A Suffolk slice chain with village roots

The Pizzeria is a Long Island group, not a national brand. Its eight shops run across Suffolk County and just over the Nassau line at the Smith Haven Mall: Babylon, Bay Shore, Smithtown, Yaphank, Lindenhurst, Islip, Bayport and Lake Grove. Long Island Wave covered the group back in 2021 when it was opening its third and fourth locations; it has doubled since.

The Babylon shop sits in the middle of East Main Street's restaurant row, a block that has spent the last few years filling in with new kitchens and reopened storefronts. One of them going dark in the middle of summer, in a village that lives on its summer foot traffic, was the kind of absence neighbors noticed daily. The comments under the company's July announcement filled with well wishes, including regulars promising to drive to Bay Shore or Lindenhurst until Babylon came back.

Back to normal hours

The reopened shop returns on its regular schedule: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.

If you have been rerouting your slice habit since mid July, the detour is over. The floor is new, the ovens are new, and the corner of Main Street that smelled like fresh pies all last summer smells like them again.