Carmine Vento

Carmine Vento died on October 30, 2026, at the age of 78. Carmine's Pizza Kitchen announced his death in a social media post on October 31, and it was reported by KLAS 8 News Now. The family's statement said he would be remembered for more than his pizza, describing a man who built his business around welcoming people and creating community. No cause of death was made public, and funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of the first reports.

Carmine Vento was born in Sicily, Italy, around 1948. In 1958, when he was nine, his family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York, and he arrived speaking no English. He grew up in a rough area near Red Hook and later spoke of enduring slurs aimed at Italian Americans as a child, which for years made him reluctant to put his own name on his businesses.

He and his siblings learned to make pizza in Brooklyn slice shops. He dropped out of school at 15 to work full time and by his late teens had worked in pizzerias in Brooklyn, Manhattan and New Jersey, beginning as a dishwasher at a New Jersey shop that sold around 700 pizzas a day. He then served two years in the United States Army.

After the Army Vento tried to leave the pizza trade, working on Wall Street, as a painter and for the utility Con Edison, but none paid as well, and he returned to pizza at a busy Staten Island pizzeria. After about three years of long shifts there, he and his wife Annie decided to move to Las Vegas, arriving on July 9, 1975. He briefly drove a cab.

On February 4, 1976, he opened Villa Pizza in Commercial Center on East Sahara Avenue, believed to be the first shop in Las Vegas to sell pizza by the slice. He made the pizzas and did deliveries while Annie ran the front of the house. A Culinary Union strike a few months later sent idle hotel workers to the shop, and growth followed. A second Villa Pizza opened in 1978, and the chain grew to around ten owned or licensed shops, a neighbourhood fixture for a generation of locals.

He sold the Villa Pizza business in the early 2000s (reports give 2000 and 2002) to concentrate on larger restaurants and sports bars, including Instant Replay, Carmine's on the Hill, Carmine's Little Italy and Ventano Italian Grill and Seafood in Henderson. The downturn after 2008 brought bank lawsuits, and in December 2010 the Vento Family Trust filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, listing assets and liabilities each over 10 million dollars.

In 2014 a landlord at Carnegie Street and West Horizon Ridge Parkway in Henderson offered him a pizzeria space on easy terms. He said he did not want to go back into the pizza business, but he took it, and it became the first Carmine's Pizza Kitchen. The brand grew to four locations, with a fifth planned, run with his sons. He kept to old methods, using Napoli plum tomatoes in an undiluted sauce and abandoning a brief experiment with wood fired ovens. In January and February 2026 the family celebrated fifty years since Villa Pizza opened with a 50,000 dollar prize draw.

Vento was married to Annie Vento for 50 years. She worked alongside him from the first day of Villa Pizza and died in 2020. They had three children, Frank, John and Connie. Frank and John worked with their father in the business, Frank also owning his own Carmine's Pizza Kitchen location. A nephew from Italy and a cousin also worked at the pizzeria. Customers knew him as Uncle Carmine, and he took particular pride in serving families across two and three generations.

Vento is credited with introducing New York style pizza by the slice to Las Vegas, at a time when local pizza was mostly a side item in sit down restaurants. Villa Pizza became one of the city's best known local chains, and his later Carmine's Pizza Kitchen restaurants continued under his children. Local food writers described him as one of the people who helped create the city's pizza culture, and his fifty years in business made him one of the longest serving independent restaurateurs in the valley.