In 1976, Raffaele and Maria Abbenante opened a small pizzeria in Lake Worth and sold pizza by the slice, using recipes they carried over from Ponza, a small island off the coast between Rome and Naples. Fifty years later, Lynora's runs six kitchens across Palm Beach and Martin counties, has three more marked as coming soon, and, according to the family's own telling, the two founders can still turn up in the kitchen or working the dining room.

The restaurant's website now opens with a thank-you for 50 years, signed by the Abbenante family. It is a good moment to look at how a neighborhood slice shop became one of the county's best known Italian names, and where it goes next.

How it started on the Lake Worth side of the bridge

The family's own account is plain about the start. There was no grand plan: two people from a Tyrrhenian island, a handful of family recipes and a pizzeria in Lake Worth (the city added Beach to its name in 2019). The early business was slices over a counter. Over time it became the kind of place where people brought their kids, and then their kids' kids.

That is the part of the Lynora's story that does real work. Plenty of Italian restaurants in Palm Beach County are newer, bigger or more fashionable. Very few can say the same family has fed the same county for half a century and started doing it in a small beach town decades before the county's current restaurant boom.

Where to find it now

Today the locations page lists six open kitchens. In West Palm Beach there are two: the full restaurant at 207 Clematis Street downtown, and Lynora's on Dixie at 3301 S. Dixie Highway, which also anchors the family's catering and private events. North county has Palm Beach Gardens at 5320 Donald Ross Road and Jupiter at 1548 US-1. Boca Raton's restaurant is out west at 9560 Glades Road, and there is a Treasure Coast outpost in Palm City on SW Mapp Road.

The menu across those rooms leans on what the business was built on, with a lot added since. Pizzas run from a hot honey and soppressata pie to burrata and prosciutto. House meatballs come with house-made ricotta. Weekend brunch, served Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., includes zeppole with Nutella and ricotta, a risotto carbonara topped with an egg and a carbonara pizza. It is a long way from a slice counter, though the slice is still the reason the family is here.

Next: Delray Beach and Fort Lauderdale

The bigger news for South Florida is in the coming-soon column. Lynora's website lists three new restaurants on the way:

Delray Beach, at 630 NE 5th Avenue, the northbound half of Federal Highway, just north of downtown. For south county families who have been driving to Boca's west side or up to Clematis, this puts Lynora's a few blocks from Atlantic Avenue. The Delray page already carries the full menu, including weekend brunch, but no opening date or hours yet.

Fort Lauderdale, at 2980 N. Federal Highway, which would be the family's first restaurant in Broward County and a real step south from the Lake Worth original.

Melbourne, on East New Haven Avenue in that city's downtown, extending the Treasure Coast reach that began with Palm City.

None of the three has a posted opening date. The safest way to know when doors open is the location pages on the restaurant's site, which will add hours and a phone number when each one is ready.

Why a 50th matters here

South Florida is hard on restaurants. Leases turn over, neighborhoods change, and a place that felt permanent can be gone in a season. A family business reaching 50 years in Palm Beach County, and choosing to expand rather than sell, is unusual enough to be worth a moment of attention.

It also says something about what people here actually want. Lynora's did not grow on a concept or a celebrity chef. It grew on the same thing a neighborhood pizzeria in Lake Worth offered in 1976: a family you could recognize, food that tasted like somebody's home, and a table big enough for one more.

If you grew up in Lake Worth Beach, Lantana or West Palm, there is a decent chance your first Lynora's slice came from the original counter. If you live in Delray or Fort Lauderdale, your first one is on the way. Either way, fifty years in, you might still catch the founders making the rounds.