Philadelphia's Old-School Italian Restaurant Puts Opera Singer Servers In The Spotlight

Philadelphia's biggest culinary claim to fame is the delicious cheesesteaks you can find there, the particular food most associated with the city. But it has other gastronomic gems besides cheesesteak shops, like Polish spot Mom-Mom's Kitchen, Pennsylvania's best hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and the last stand-alone location of America's oldest ice cream company. Another Philly institution is The Victor Café, which has been serving Italian food for nearly a century, and where the talented servers do double duty singing opera arias for patrons.

Italian immigrant John DiStefano opened the future restaurant in 1918 in South Philadelphia as a store selling Victor gramophones and records. People could also get an ice cream or espresso at DiStefano's Gramophone Shop, and members of the area's Italian-American community would meet up there while music played, especially the classical and opera he loved. However, the store suffered during the Great Depression, and after Prohibition ended in 1933, he opened the restaurant with a beer and wine license in hand, calling it The Victor Café, with the tagline: "Music Lover's Rendezvous." His sons eventually took over, and then his grandsons, brothers Greg and Rick DiStefano, who run it now.

John DiStefano played his records in the restaurant, and neighborhood patrons would sometimes get up from their meal and sing along, Rick DiStefano told WHYY. In 1979, an opera student who was working as a waiter began singing for the customers. It eventually became a tradition, and Rick said all the servers now are singers who perform opera. Every 20 minutes, they ring a bell, and one of them performs and shares the story of the aria. Customers can also request a song.

The Victor Café is open every day for dinner and serves classic Italian dishes like bucatini all'Amatriciana, veal saltimbocca, and spaghetti with braciole, meatballs, and sausage. Appropriately, a couple of its dishes are named after operas: The Tosca is chicken breast stuffed with Fontina cheese and prosciutto over polenta; and the Prince Igor is pasta with vodka sauce with salmon and asparagus. There's also the Caruso, for legendary tenor Enrico Caruso, which contains sautéed chicken livers with onion and wild mushrooms in Marsala with tomato over linguine.

The restaurant's servers shared their arias with the neighborhood when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down indoor dining in 2020. When The Victor Café began doing takeout orders after being closed for a while early on, servers would sing outside from its second-floor balcony. Delighted neighbors gathered to listen, and they began doing a few songs in a row. The balcony singing continued when the restaurant reopened with outdoor seating.

Another form of entertainment doubly sealed The Victor Café's place in Philadelphia lore. It served as the stand-in for the fictional Adrian's restaurant in the "Rocky" franchise movies "Rocky Balboa" in 2006, "Creed," and "Creed II." Several scenes with Sylvester Stallone were filmed there. Adrian's was Rocky and his late wife's restaurant named after her, which he was still running alone in "Rocky Balboa."