A local restaurant known for its home-style Italian cuisine — and for a mechanized Boise icon toiling high above it — plans to close.
But Idahoans have time for one last taste.
Cucina di Paolo, 1504 S. Vista Ave., plans to shut its doors permanently April 27 — after a final day of Italian and American comfort food, take-and-bake meals and plenty of memories.
“I wanted to give people the opportunity to say goodbye,” said Mary Jean Wegner, who opened the restaurant in 2007 with her husband, Paul, in a former Maytag Laundry building. “That was my way of thanking them.”
Even Boiseans who have never eaten at Cucina di Paolo are familiar with what is one of the city’s more memorable sights: Betty the Washerwoman, an animatronic woman working over a tub perched above the restaurant’s sign.
A leftover from the Maytag building days, Betty has been a familiar sight since at least the 1950s. She wasn’t always functioning, got repaired, motor replaced, even vandalized. But the community seemed to grow more fond of her as time passed — and Cucina di Paolo was a big part of that. “We wanted Betty to be more than a historic icon,” Paul Wegner told the Statesman in 2019.