What Happened to Stella's Italian Restaurant? (Stratford, CT)

Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) featured Stella's Italian Restaurant of Stratford, Connecticut, in an episode that aired August 8, 2012. The family-owned pizzeria and Italian restaurant, in business since 1978, struggled, as shown in the episode, with a menu that had grown too large and inconsistent for the kitchen to execute well, along with a dining room in need of updating. As shown in the episode, Robert Irvine judged the restaurant's core pizza recipe strong enough that his team left it entirely untouched rather than reworking it from scratch.

Instead, Irvine's team built a new line of signature pasta sauces and pizzas around Stella's existing strengths and streamlined the rest of the menu, blending Italian standbys with new dishes, including a pasta dish credited to Irvine himself featuring fresh basil and potato puree served alongside a New York strip steak. The goal was a tighter, more consistent menu that would let the kitchen keep quality high during weekend rushes without overextending the staff. Despite the changes, Food Network Gossip reported in July 2014 that Stella's Italian Restaurant had closed.

The restaurant had operated out of the Oronoque Shopping Plaza at 7365 Main Street, a location that had served Stratford diners for more than three decades under the same family. In November 2019, La Fortuna, a new restaurant, opened at the same Oronoque Shopping Plaza address, Patch reported, and Hartford Business Journal described it as a "savory successor to Stella's" occupying a renovated version of the old space. La Fortuna serves contemporary Italian fare, including brick-oven pizza, under ownership unconnected to the family that ran Stella's for nearly four decades. La Fortuna is a different restaurant that opened more than five years after Stella's closed, so the business featured on the show no longer operates.