{"id":315507,"date":"2026-10-27T18:46:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T18:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/315507\/"},"modified":"2026-10-27T18:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T18:46:08","slug":"marc-vetri-the-godfather-of-phillys-new-italian-american-cuisine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/315507\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Vetri: The Godfather of Philly\u2019s New Italian American Cuisine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNews<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

In the \u201990s, red gravy flowed through every Italian restaurant in Philly. Then came Marc Vetri.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Marc<\/p>\n

Marc Vetri \/ Photography by Clay Williams<\/p>\n

Welcome to Philly\u2019s Italian Renaissance. This week, we are diving deep into the evolution of our city\u2019s Italian American food scene \u2014 from Marc Vetri, the godfather of this movement, to the chefs blending old-world traditions with their personal whims to create an entirely new cuisine. Check back daily for stories from Philly Mag\u2019s November cover story.<\/p>\n

Marc Vetri took a walk. He had to get out of the restaurant. He couldn\u2019t look at the crowd \u2014 if you could call four tables a crowd \u2014 anymore. \u201cI\u2019ll be right back,\u201d he told Jeff Benjamin, his partner, and walked outside, into the October night, down Spruce and up Broad. All the restaurants he passed were full. How many of them had eggplant parm and meatballs on their menus, two dishes Vetri did not serve but people who wandered in off the street kept asking about? There\u2019s nothing wrong with that stuff, Vetri would reply, but this is more, you know, food from Italy. Incredulous, they\u2019d respond, Well, that\u2019s from Italy too.<\/p>\n

This was the broad understanding of local Italian cooking in 1998 when Vetri opened his first restaurant<\/a>, simply called Vetri. \u201cIt was horrible\u201d in those first few months, he tells me now on a call from Boulder, Colorado, where he spends several zen weeks every summer fly-fishing, doing yoga, and just generally being Marc Vetri, husband and father, and not Marc Vetri, godfather of Northern Italian cuisine in Philadelphia. Back in those early months, after he\u2019d slink back to the kitchen from those self-flagellating stress-strolls, \u201cJeff would yell at me: \u2018Stop looking in other restaurants!\u2019 I wondered if we were gonna make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

How wild that sounds in retrospect. Vetri the restaurant made it, pulling down accolades from Wine Spectator and The New York Times and today one of the most rarefied reservations in the city. Vetri the man, a Food & Wine Best New Chef in 1999 and James Beard\u2019s Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic in 2005, did too. Taken together, they are the pebble, the city is the pond, and contained in the innumerable concentric ripples is everything from Osteria to Zahav, Meetinghouse to Her Place. I asked some of the chefs who came up through the Spruce Street townhouse, coaxing caramelized onions and truffled fonduta into libidinous crepes and barbecuing baby goat in the back yard, for a one-word assessment of Vetri\u2019s effect on this city\u2019s collective understanding of Italian cooking. Revolutionary (Andrew DiTomo), historic (Michael Solomonov), and transformative (Joey Baldino and Dionicio Jim\u00e9nez) are some of the adjectives I got back. Necessary is the word Kristina Burke, whose late husband, Jim Burke, was on Vetri\u2019s opening team, reached for: \u201cPhilly needed to know there was more than Italian American red-sauce cooking and dining.\u201d<\/p>\n

Red gravy was Vetri\u2019s birthright, reinforced during family meals of lasagna, mussels marinara, and fried smelts at his Sicilian-immigrant grandparents\u2019 rowhome at 7th and League, and at dinners out at Villa di Roma, Dante & Luigi\u2019s, and Ralph\u2019s. \u201cI didn\u2019t have any sort of understanding of what real, regional, seasonal Italian food was,\u201d he says, let alone the aristocratic proclivities of Northern Italian cooking. Even the ancestral peasant food in Bergamo, the Lombardian town in which Vetri staged after leaving Wolfgang Puck\u2019s Los Angeles orbit, had an aristocratic air. One of the first dishes he tasted and learned to make at Taverna Colleoni dell\u2019Angelo was casoncelli, a pasta filled with salumi scraps, winey raisins, and crushed amaretti cookies, all glossed in sage-infused brown butter. Compared to the pugnacious tomato-and-chili-powered cooking of the South he grew up on and the plucky, Puck-y nouvelle pastas he\u2019d been cooking professionally, casoncelli were so foreign they might as well have been Shanghai soup dumplings. \u201cIt was,\u201d Vetri remembers, \u201ca holy-shit moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pasta at Fiorella<\/p>\n

The casoncelli appeared on the original menu at Vetri, along with fettuccine cradling morsels of wild-boar rag\u00f9 and almond tortellini, teleporting holy-shit moments to the Philly dining public \u2014 and to his cooks. \u201cBefore Vetri opened, I had never been exposed to real Northern Italian cuisine,\u201d says Baldino, another South Philly son. While his Collings\u00adwood flagship, Zeppoli<\/a>, specializes in the sun-soaked dishes of Sicily, \u201cto this day, I use all of the techniques that I learned in my time there.\u201d<\/p>\n

A version of the orb-like Vetri spinach gnocchi has been on Zeppoli\u2019s menu since Baldino opened the BYO in 2011, but my favorite pasta there (my favorite pasta in the world, honestly) is the lacy lemon tagliatelle, which vibrates with citrus and salinity from a tableside bottarga shower. When I mentally catalog the most memorable pastas in the city, past and present, most of them bear the watermark of Vetri\u2019s Spruce Street institution: Jeff Michaud\u2019s chicken-liver rigatoni at Osteria<\/a>, whose earthy, gutsy rag\u00f9 conjures a hunt through Italian woods as winter encroaches; Jim Burke\u2019s tagliatelle with duck rag\u00f9 enriched with dark chocolate and lifted with orange at James, a dish as deeply missed as its chef; the genre-bending huitlacoche ravioli Jim\u00e9nez used to special at Cantina la Martina<\/a>, its brown butter suffused with epazote instead of sage.<\/p>\n

This past July at Vetri\u2019s Fiorella<\/a>, I sat awash in the red-orange glow of the neon sign and added another pasta to this collection. Wearing a tight summer buzz cut and peony-print apron, chef Matt Rodrigue, who\u2019s been with Vetri since 2014\u2019s Lo Spiedo, plated slick caramelle with cores of sweet corn, ricotta \u2026 and huitlacoche. The Vetri influence has boomeranged back on itself, bending around culture and cuisine, representing a new era of evolution that is neither red-gravy nor rarefied Northern Italian but its own thing altogether.<\/p>\n

Published as \u201cThe Godfather\u201d in the November 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News In the \u201990s, red gravy flowed through every Italian restaurant in Philly. Then came Marc Vetri. Marc…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-315507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}