A South Philly Legend Builds Its First Real Restaurant — on Our Side of the River

Drive down the Black Horse Pike past the old Di'Nic's building lately and you'll see something that made me pull over: construction crews, a gutted shell, and the beginnings of what's going to be, if the pizza gods are kind, the best sandwich you can get in Camden County by the time the leaves turn.

Angelo's Pizzeria is coming to Jersey. Not a pop-up, not a ghost-kitchen delivery window — a full-service, sit-down Angelo's, at 310 Black Horse Pike, in the stand-alone building that used to house Di'Nic's roast pork. And I need you to understand what that means, because if you only know Angelo's as a name, you don't yet know why people on Ninth Street line up in the rain for it.

Why people wait in the rain for it

Danny DiGiampietro built Angelo's into a Michelin-recommended obsession out of a corner shop near the Italian Market, a place so small it's practically bursting through its own walls. The pizza has the leopard-spotted, thin-but-structured crust that people argue about on the internet. But it's the hoagies that ruined me — the Italian, the roast pork with sharp provolone and greens, bread with a crackle that shatters and then goes pillowy, meat that tastes like somebody's grandmother was standing over it.

DiGiampietro has been chasing two dreams at once this year — he bought a landmark bakery up in Conshohocken and shipped in top-tier baking equipment from France to control his own rolls, which, if you know anything about a great hoagie, is the whole ballgame. Bread is where most sandwiches in this country go to die. A shop that bakes its own, on machines it obsessed over, is a shop that's taking the thing seriously. The word is the Pike location should open by the end of the summer.

When a Philadelphia institution of this caliber looks at a map and plants a full restaurant here, that’s a vote of confidence in us.Sophia Marino

A vote of confidence in us

South Jersey has always had a slight inferiority complex about food — the sense that the great stuff lives across the bridge and we drive to it. Some of that we've earned back ourselves; Collingswood and Haddonfield and Audubon have quietly built a real dining scene. But when a Philadelphia institution of this caliber decides to plant a full restaurant here — not a satellite, a restaurant — that's a vote of confidence in us.

I don't do breathless before I've tasted a single thing, and I won't start now. A new build is a promise, not a meal. A beloved shop trying to become a full-service restaurant is attempting a genuinely hard thing — service and scale can dull the very edge that made the original worth the drive. I'll be first in line, and I'll tell you the truth about what comes out, roll and all. But I'll admit it: I got a little emotional standing in that parking lot looking at the plywood. Save room, South Jersey. If the bread is what Danny says it is, we're not driving to Ninth Street this fall. Ninth Street drove to us.

Based on reporting from The Philadelphia Inquirer, PhillyVoice, NBC10 Philadelphia, and 42Freeway.