by Paul Bass The New Haven independent
A landlord is scheduled to get his day in court next week in a year-long quest to boot an Instagram-worthy brunch bar from Park and Elm Streets.
The landlord, Michael Shaffer of the CA White real estate company, has been seeking in court to have The Place 2 Be evicted since March 2025 for nonpayment of rent. Judge Alayna Stone has scheduled a hearing in the case for next Tuesday in the third-floor housing court at the 121 Elm St. courthouse.
The restaurant — once one of four Place 2 Be franchises in Connecticut and Massachusetts — abruptly closed its doors last week after the state Department of Revenue Services issued a March 23 order revoking its sales and use tax permit for all state locations. (Asked for details about the offense, a spokeswoman said the department can’t under law reveal specific taxpayer information.) The revocation followed years of lawsuits against the company, as well as an arrest of the principal owner last September on still-pending charges of second-degree larceny and issuing a bad check over $2,000. The owner, Gjinovefa Luari, has pleaded not guilty to both charges, according to the state judicial database. (Connecticut Insider’s Nathaniel Rosenberg previously reported on the permit revocation.)
“We don’t know what their plans are with regard to the state’s action to rescind their sales and use permit. We have a court date in a week to try to resolve the matter from our perspective,” Schaffer told the Independent.
The brick two-story building at Park and Elm was originally a firehouse. It was reborn in the early 1980s as a fern bar called Fitzwilly’s, a harbinger of an earlier wave of tentative gentrification in town. It subsequently became a popular restaurant and bar called Box 63, which became a casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Place 2 Be franchise opened in December 2022 with colorful backdrops (like painted messages on the wall such as “Drink My Bathwater”) designed for patrons to snap social-media photos of themselves experiencing bliss getting sauced while the sun was still out.
Place 2 Be principal owner Luari and attorney Brian Silver could not be reached for comment. Silver argued in an unsuccessful August 2025 motion in the eviction case that the restaurant had made some back rental payments at one point that arrived late because of its “bank’s processing time.” He wrote that the company “invested over $700,000 in buildout costs on the property, funded in part through a commercial loan tied to the lease.”