Dinner at the Club

PART 1

THE CLUB

The official name of the row house at 1408 South 12th Street in South Philadelphia is Filippo Palizzi Societa di Mutuo Soccorso di Vasto, but we always just called it the Club.

Filippo Palizzi was a famous painter from Vasto, a seaside village in Abruzzo on Italy’s Adriatic coast. When Dominico DiCicco and other immigrants from the town resettled in South Philly and founded the Club in 1918, they chose the artist as its namesake. These newcomers to America didn’t have much money or speak the language, so this smoky, wood-paneled, row home hangout became a way for them to preserve their traditions and take care of one another. In the early years, membership dues would pay for health care, funerals, and benefits for member families in need. Over the decades, the assembly grew to two hundred members, relaxing the charter rules to first allow Italians from outside Abruzzo, then women. Italian American entertainers would drop by when they were in town—boxers, comedians, even Frank Sinatra, whose signed headshot hangs on the wall.

From the very beginning, I’ve had a familial connection to the Club. Dominico’s daughter-in-law, Angela Rosa Catrambone DiCicco, and my maternal grandmother, Marianne Catrambone Mazza, were sisters, and part of the wave of immigration to South Philly from Calabria. My grandmother had five kids: Regina, my mom; my uncles Joseph and Al; my aunt Roma; and my Aunt Mary. Mary married Ernest Mezzaroba around the time the Club began granting membership to non-Abruzzese Italians. In 1975, Uncle Ernie became president.

Uncle Ernie and Aunt Mary were both great cooks. In the tiny kitchen in back, Ernie would make food for the guys when they were hanging out. I can remember, as a kid coming here in the ’80s and early ’90s, we’d have huge pans of stuffed shells and whole roasted suckling pigs at family events, such as my cousin’s Holy Communion party. I remember the tables, Formica tops with ridged chrome edges.

The Club was a huge part of my childhood growing up in South Philly, but by the time I was old enough to really appreciate it, things were on the decline. Back in the day, there were dozens of Italian social clubs in the various neighborhoods, but as those original immigrants and the following generations became more educated, affluent, and mainstreamed into American society, their significance fell off. Social clubs became more of a nostalgia thing than the vital institution they once were, and Palizzi was no exception. Uncle Ernie would open three nights a week, then dropped it to two nights a week, then eventually would just open Sundays for the guys to hang out for a couple hours after Mass. By 2016, he was the last member left, and dying of cancer.

I had no plans to open another restaurant. I was happy with Zeppoli, my little Sicilian spot over the bridge in Jersey, seven years old and still busy. There was a lot of talk about the future of the Club, but me taking over… that wasn’t even on my radar. Then one day, Uncle Ernie and my three older cousins approached me, “Well, what about you?”

At first I said no. I wasn’t interested. Then my Cousin Al took me by the Club, and it was the first time I had been there in probably six years. It was like an older relative I had gotten too busy to visit more often, and I had forgotten what it was all about. Being there, looking through boxes of old war uniforms, mementos from Vasto, even the original gavel the members used at their meetings, I realized what a special place it was, and how important it was to these guys. There were all these old leather-bound ledgers with the most meticulous notes in flowing Catholic-school cursive. They kept minutes of all their meetings, whether they were planning a beef-and-beer for someone’s sick kid or just shooting the shit about politics and sports. I didn’t want to just let it die.

Uncle Ernie did, shortly after selling me the Club. If I hadn’t taken it over, it would have just become a row home or apartment building, and I couldn’t let that happen. I opened the “new” Palizzi Social Club in February 2017, and I wish Uncle Ernie were alive to see it. I think he’d be proud of the work we’ve done to the place: expanding the kitchen so I can serve a full dinner menu four nights a week, turning the huge old safe into a service station, bringing the rainbow of vinyl barstools back to a bowling-ball sparkle, hauling the old cigarette machine up from the basement, hanging a black-and-white picture of him and Aunt Mary on the wall across from the bar. I even fixed the hole in the floor in the kitchen, the one Uncle Ernie fell through one night (drunk) and broke his arm.

Our membership is booming under a new, inclusive charter. Now your last name doesn’t need to end in a vowel to be a member. Anyone can apply—Italian, Jewish, Irish, black, Mexican, Asian, or any of the other colors and backgrounds that make up this crazy, idiosyncratic, vibrant part of Philadelphia I call home and care so much about. Thursday through Sunday, the neon is on, and Filippo Palizzi Societa di Mutuo Soccorso di Vasto is ready to be your home away from home. Officially, we’ve shortened the name to the Palizzi Social Club—but you’re always welcome to just call it the Club.

PART 2

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

South Philly has always been a haven for immigrants. Although the countries of origin have changed over the last 150 years—the Eastern Europeans, Irish, Italians, and Lebanese of the late 1800s and early 1900s and African Americans of the Great Migration are the Mexicans, Syrians, and Southeast Asians of today—it remains a place where someone far from home can make a new one. Our narrow streets and sturdy brick buildings adapt well to newcomers, whether they’re from Jakarta or New Jersey. The nineteenth-century synagogues around Mifflin Square have become Cambodian Buddhist temples. The old Edward W. Bok technical school, a concrete monster built in 1938 and decommissioned in 2013, is now a creative hive of photographers, jewelers, bakers, and calligraphers, with a restaurant on the roof.

Despite its outsize presence in the city’s history and lore, South Philly takes up a relatively small part of Philadelphia, only about 10 percent by square miles. The Delaware River borders the area to the east, sweeping down along the old Navy Yard and sports complex to form the southern boundary as well, where it links up with the Schuylkill River on the west. Those borders are undisputed. The northern one, depends on whom you ask. Traditionally, everything below South Street is South Philly, but over the decades, the upper reaches have been absorbed into Center City. Even parts of Bella Vista, the historic heart of Italian American South Philly, feel more uptown than downtown these days.

The Club is in the neighborhood directly to the south of Bella Vista, in East Passyunk, which runs between Washington and Snyder Avenues, Broad and 8th Streets. Back in the day, Catholic parishes identified the areas within—you were from Saint Nick’s or Annunciation—but as the neighborhood’s DNA has changed, so has the church-centered cartography. Now real estate agents divide the district in two distinct adjacent areas, Passyunk Square and East Passyunk Crossing, but everyone here these days just says East Passyunk, which is also the name of the main commercial strip running diagonally through the neighborhood.

Coinciding with the decline of social clubs in the area, East Passyunk in the ’80s and ’90s had been dealing with depopulation of its core customers as white flight sent many middle-class Italian Americans over the bridge into New Jersey. (Washington Township, New Jersey, earned the nickname South Philly with Grass during this period.) Vacancies darkened Passyunk Avenue like missing teeth. Sure, people still went there for their Holy Communion outfits and Catholic school uniforms, or freshly made mozzarella balls swaddled in deli paper from Mr. Mancuso’s—but things were way off from the strip’s heyday as the vital spine of South Philly commerce.

Around the turn of the millennium Bella Vista began gaining traction as a cool and affordable neighborhood for those priced out of Center City, and as home prices there surged, buyers who never before crossed Washington Avenue started doing so and discovering East Passyunk. You know what happens next, same as it has in hundreds of other neighborhoods in hundreds of other cities across the country: galleries, cafés, a new generation of independent shops, and fantastic new restaurants to complement the been-there-forever ones like Mr. Martino’s, where I bussed and waited tables as a teenager. In the span of a decade, East Passyunk became one of the hottest neighborhoods in Philly.

Many neighborhoods caught up in a real estate gold rush lose their identity. Thus far, that hasn’t happened here. East Passyunk has been able to preserve its original spirit. There are tons of OGs still living here, sweeping their pavements and grumbling about parking and holding court on their stoops with bottles of bathtub limoncello, and the best of the old businesses are still in business, including Mancuso’s, where my mom still buys cheese. Even though my version of the Club is “new,” I feel that I’m the steward of something very old, something whose preservation is of essential importance. For my family and for the neighborhood.

PART 3

THE FOOD

The recipes in the pages that follow are not fancy and, for the most part, not complicated. They come from or are inspired by our family dinners and holiday meals prepared by my mother and her sisters, a sorority of great cooks I’ve been learning from since I was old enough to hold a knife, long before I knew I wanted to cook professionally. They come from the Club and my Uncle Ernie, who I’d find in the backyard tending lamb chops on the grill (here), or hovered over the deep fryer tending a batch of Fritto Misto (here).