Joe Restivo, 54; Blake Case Put His Eatery in the Limelight

Joe Restivo, a onetime stand-up comic and the former longtime co-owner of Vitello’s restaurant in Studio City, where actor Robert Blake and his wife dined the night she was killed, has died. He was 54.

Restivo died of lung cancer Tuesday at his home in West Hills, his family said.

Restivo and his brother Steve had owned Vitello’s for nearly a quarter of a century when the 2001 killing of Blake’s wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, thrust the popular Italian eatery into the limelight.

Blake, then a Studio City resident, was one of the many show business regulars at Vitello’s, whose menu included a spinach and pasta dish bearing the name of the former star of TV’s “Baretta.”

After the couple finished their meal and left the restaurant the night of May 4, 2001, Bakley was found shot to death in Blake’s car on a nearby residential street.

Blake later said he had left his wife in the car to return to the restaurant to get a handgun that had slipped from his waistband, and when he got back to the car he discovered his wife slumped over in the passenger seat, shot once in the head.

In a Times interview the day after the slaying, Joe Restivo said he did not remember Blake returning to the restaurant for the handgun but said the actor came back frantic after the shooting.

In 2005, Blake was acquitted of murder charges but later the same year a civil jury found that he had “intentionally caused” his wife’s death and awarded her children $30 million in damages. In February, Blake filed for bankruptcy.

After the killing, Vitello’s was frequently mentioned on television, from network news shows to entertainment gossip programs and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” The restaurant, which saw an increase in customers after the incident, also became a stop on tour-bus itineraries.

Vitello’s has a heavy celebrity clientele, and hundreds of autographed photos adorn the walls of its foyer.

“Joe was a kind man who always had a smile and a funny remark,” director Garry Marshall said Wednesday in a statement to The Times, “and he and his brother Steve would make going to their restaurant, Vitello’s, like being a part of their family.”

The Restivos sold the restaurant last year.

Joe Restivo was born in Italy in a small town in Sicily on March 14, 1952, and moved to Chicago with his family in 1956.

Before buying Vitello’s in 1977, the Restivo brothers owned an Italian restaurant in Chicago, where Joe Restivo began learning the business as a young teenager and became a full partner with his older brother at 17.

Restivo, who had the same name as another comedian, began doing stand-up in Chicago in 1976 and continued performing his comedy act in the Los Angeles area until the early 1990s.

He also worked occasionally as a character actor.

He is survived by his wife, Sheila; his son, Rosario; his brothers, Steve and Salvatore; and his sisters, Lucy Ricciardone and Giovanna Culotta.

A funeral Mass will be said at 1:15 p.m. today at St. Charles Borromeo Church, 10800 Moorpark St., North Hollywood.