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Patrick and Phoebe Célestin are ready to hang up their gumbo ladles — for good this time.

The couple will close Célestin’s Restaurant at the end of 2022, Phoebe Célestin confirmed to The Sacramento Bee on Friday, ending a nearly 40-year run.

“It really is a love story to our community,” Phoebe Célestin said. “We’ve been in three different locations in our city, and they’ve all served us well. People found us wherever we were, and they were always glad to know where we were.”

The full range of Southern food wasn’t appreciated the way it is today when the couple opened Célestin’s Restaurant in 1983. Even today, few Sacramento-area restaurants serve Célestin’s Creole, Cajun and Caribbean specialties, such as jambalaya or the Haitian dish griot (citrus-marinated pork chunks, braised and deep-fried).

Célestin’s Restaurant first opened at 25th and J streets in midtown Sacramento, where it stayed for 18 years until moving to 1815 K St. (now home to The Porch Restaurant & Bar) and adopting the name “Célestin’s Island Eats and Cajun Cuisine” in 2002.

Patrick and Phoebe closed their business and retired in 2011, but reopened it in 2017 at 3610 McKinley Blvd. The COVID-19 pandemic challenged their 1,500-square foot restaurant with limited indoor seating. Community support and a covered parking lot parklet helped them manage some of the financial sting from those years.

The Célestins had planned to un-retire long enough to show business partners Rafer Chambers and Rijindar Bains the ropes before letting them take over. The partnership didn’t work out, though, and the Célestins bought Chambers and Bains out of their ownership stakes in the early years.

The Célestins now seek a buyer for the restaurant, listed with nearly all assets at $160,000, who will make it into their own a community fixture. Recipes and the business name could be available for a bit more money, but the couple isn’t exactly seeking a successor.

“They’re basically looking for the right fit,” said broker Matt Axford of Turton Commercial Real Estate, who is selling the business. “This has been their pride and joy for a long time, and they’re looking for someone else that’ll make it their pride and joy as well. They’re not exactly looking for someone that’ll serve chicken nuggets.”

There’s been no shortage of applicants so far, said Axford and his partner Kimio Bazett. That makes sense: it’s a turnkey operation as clean as either longtime restaurant industry veteran say they’ve ever seen.

“We have basically primed the location for the next business owner, because we drove a lot more traffic to that site than had previously been drawn there,” Phoebe Célestin said.

Célestin’s was named one of The Sacramento Bee’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2021. A refreshing white wine cocktail called the “margajito,” part margarita and part mojito, stood out in a June review, along with Brazilian-style Pacific snapper and the flagship gumbo.

Célestin’s Restaurant is currently open from 3-8 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday and 2:30-9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.