Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Pellegrino.
Hi Michael, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Today, I’m the chef-owner of Eternal Sunshine Café in Wilmington, known for our creative Benedicts, modern French toast dishes, and seasonal menu drops that give our guests something new to look forward to. But the path to get here started long before I ever learned to cook — and in a very different way than most chefs. What has always driven me is the mix of creativity and structure: designing systems, evolving ideas, and building experiences that make people feel something.
The first memory I have of wanting to own a restaurant goes back to 6th grade, when a math project led me to design a menu. Later in high school, while working at Panera, I created my own sandwich shop concept with a fully designed menu and restaurant layout. Even then, I was designing my own kitchen layouts with efficiency and flow in mind, and my focus naturally gravitated toward restaurant design, systems, and creative dish ideas.
I didn’t grow up loving to cook, and I wasn’t raised in one of those families that bonded in the kitchen or passed down recipes. I was raised by my single mother, who worked two jobs — one of them as a baker and cake decorator — so most of my childhood meals were cereal, pizza, and whatever was quick. My dad did cook, but I only had a relationship with him for a short time in middle school and briefly again in high school. Outside of those small windows, cooking just wasn’t part of my world growing up.
By my late teens, the early interest I had in restaurant design started to develop into something more serious. I began building out full restaurant concepts — not just layouts, but menus, themes, and identities. I kept sketching ideas, refining dishes, and imagining what my own place could look like. It was the earliest form of the creative process I still use today.
There was a breakfast spot near my house called AJ’s in North Haven, CT, where I’d go in my late teens for an Eggs Benedict and a stuffed French toast I couldn’t find anywhere else. That’s where the idea really clicked. I started imagining my own breakfast concept built around unique Benedicts, French toasts, and pancakes I wasn’t seeing on other menus.
Around that same time, I worked at Michael’s inside Sports Haven OTB, running both the restaurant and the concessions. I handled the daily soups and sandwich specials, and that’s where I first learned to cook — simple knife skills, sauces, and stocks. I was often the only line cook on shift, and that forced me to learn how to multitask. That’s when I realized that real multitasking starts long before service even begins — with preparation and organization.
By my early twenties, I had been refining my breakfast restaurant concept, and my mom shared that vision. When she was laid off from her full-time job at AT&T Yellow Pages, she decided it was time for a change. She sold her house and used the equity to take a risk on opening a small breakfast café nearly 700 miles away in Wilmington, NC, where we had some family.
To make that move financially possible, my mom and I lived in a single-wide trailer that had been given to us for free and relocated onto a small piece of property just outside the Wilmington city limits. That was the level of sacrifice she made to help me pursue a childhood dream and to build a different life than the one she grew up with as one of seven kids raised by a single mother who also worked two jobs. At some points, my grandmother was even in her 80s washing dishes at the café.
Eternal Sunshine Café officially opened in March 2013. I named it after the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Alexander Pope poem behind it. The name fit what the café eventually became for me — a place where I could forget everything else. And I hoped that when guests dined with us, they felt a little of that same escape.
The dream took years of hard work. There was a stretch where I worked nine months without a single day off. I was only 23 when I found myself serving as owner, manager, chef, and line cook of Eternal Sunshine Café. I dreamed of expanding to five locations and building a distribution center to support a franchise model. From the beginning, I focused on systems — efficiency, pricing formulas, and planning. But it still took several years to learn how to manage people, motivate a team, and run a tight ship. Those skills are what create smooth days, keep great employees, and deliver the best experience to guests.
In August 2019, I finally opened my second location and began putting distribution systems in place between the two cafés. It felt like the breakthrough I had been working toward for years. But a few months later, COVID hit. I lost the second location and went through a long lawsuit after former employees from the distribution department deleted all the recipes they had developed when they were laid off due to the shutdowns.
During COVID, I started studying more about chefs, Michelin-star restaurants, and avant-garde dining. I became fascinated by the creativity of Grant Achatz’s edible balloon and the boundary-pushing experience at Alchemist. Once COVID began to settle down, my focus shifted away from expansion and toward developing my own tasting-menu restaurant. I started brainstorming what an experience-driven, story-driven dinner concept could look like.
That direction became even clearer after my first Michelin-star experience at Alinea for my birthday in March 2022. It remains one of the most memorable moments of my life, and I left wanting to make guests feel the way I felt there — the surprise, the nostalgia, the storytelling, and the emotion behind each course.
I started making changes to Eternal Sunshine’s menu as a stepping stone to practice modern ingredients and new techniques — like reverse spherification — that I would eventually need for a future dinner concept. That’s when the Caribbean Illusion dish was born. A dish that looks like sunny side eggs, home fries, and toast but it is actually coconut pudding, mango puree, guava gel, cinnamon pineapples, and rum bread french toast. We’re still evolving, and always will.
During this time, I read or listened to more than 40 culinary books, worked on learning wine pairings, explored additional Michelin-star restaurants for inspiration, and created a comprehensive business plan with multiple themed seasonal menus, training manuals, and SOPs.
In my search for inspiration and new dining concepts, I came across Counter- by Chef Sam Hart in Charlotte. After the second course of my meal there, I knew it was a place I wanted to learn from. I asked to stage right in the middle of the course spiel, and Chef Sam gave me the opportunity to come in for four shifts with no boundaries. The amount I learned from him and his team in those four days — as a leader, an artist, and a chef — had a significant impact on me. Counter- is now North Carolina’s first and only Michelin-starred restaurant.
My current goal is to bring an avant-garde, story-driven tasting menu restaurant to Wilmington. I’m working toward a restaurant that treats every course like a story and every service like an experience that stays with people long after they leave. I don’t know exactly when that next chapter will open, but I know what it will be — immersive, intentional, and unlike anything Wilmington has seen. Until then, Eternal Sunshine remains the workshop where these ideas grow and the stepping stone that will carry this vision to life when the time is right.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.Theeternalsunshinecafe.com
- Instagram: @Eternalsunshinecafe
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1BVm3rcfRW/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-pellegrino-306260110/
