Italian Restaurant

It was 11 a.m. and already the wait was three deep at Perk's Place. "Love Train" by the O'Jays was the song of the moment on Oldies 98, and the Human Percolator himself was lip-syncing and doing a little bounce step while clipping 9-year-old Patrick Leach's hair. "They say, 'Didn't you used to be Billy Harner?' " said the Human Percolator with a hearty laugh. "Then they say, 'I saw you in 19-whatever.' And I say, 'I remember you. I saw you there, too.' It makes them laugh. It makes them feel better.

The opening of Giumarello's, a splendid Italian restaurant, is the latest step in the exciting revitalization of Haddon Heights. The restaurant was opened two months ago under the culinary artistry of Sam Giumarello, 22, a graduate of the Academy of Culinary Arts at Atlantic County Community College. His talent seems enormous. Like many other businesses that have taken over rehabilitated houses in Haddon Heights, Giumarello's occupies what appears to be a small converted house with a romantically attractive dining room that accommodates only 42 patrons.

Trattoria Arpeggio opened two years ago at the site of a decades-old establishment, Luigi's. Curiously, in this age of restaurant overhaul, the old-school aspects of the former landmark are not a distant memory. Arpeggio's might not be the only Italian place in this restaurant-packed region, but neither does it pretend to be anything else. Its very name says it all: You're in an Italian restaurant, complete with red-and-white table settings and a plate of seasoned olive oil to go with your bread.

With a stunning decor, good food and moderate prices, the new Ristorante Gina Rosa is a real find - a perfect place for holiday dining. Opened only a few weeks ago in John B. Canuso's Main Street development in Voorhees, this charming southern Italian restaurant has one of the classiest dining rooms in all of South Jersey. The high, walnut-coffered ceiling shows off to good advantage the room's considerable decorative features - dark woodwork, classy gray-on-gray textured wallpaper imprinted with feathers, gorgeous crystal chandeliers with individual lamps with pleated silk shades, matching sconces and floor-to- ceiling windows masked with sheers and framed with gorgeous mauve velvet drapes and valances.

Maintaining quality is a real problem in the restaurant business, where so much depends on a particular chef. The difficulty is evident with Abbondanza, a once superb but now mundane Italian restaurant outside Medford. When it opened in 1982 in the middle of Medford, Abbondanza (the name means "abundance") exulted in the culinary skills of Salvatore Tosti; but Tosti left to open his own place in Delran (then moved to Chateau Silvana outside Medford and is now at Caffe Lamberti in Cherry Hill)

Ralph P. Oliva, 70, who ran an Italian restaurant in Southwest Philadelphia, died Sunday of heart disease at Temple University Hospital. For more than 30 years, Mr. Oliva operated the Mirador Restaurant at 63d Street and Paschall Avenue. He and his father, Ralph, opened the restaurant in 1949. They offered a menu of traditional southern Italian fare - lasagna, spaghetti, ravioli - and seating in old-fashioned wooden booths. But the restaurant wasn't known for its entrees or its ambiance.

Without warning, a splendid new northern Italian restaurant - Ristorante Primavera - has sprung full-blown onto the Main Line dining scene. Nothing could be finer. Although the restaurant has been open only two weeks, the quality of food, service and atmosphere shows that this lovely spot across Lancaster Avenue from the Lancaster Farmer's Market at Strafford does not need shakedown time: It already is superb in all three categories. The handsome, bilevel dining room is bright and cheerful, thanks to enormous paintings of red and yellow flowers in green fields illuminated by spotlights.

Another restauranteur will try his hand at business on the corner of Easton and Kelly Roads in Warrington, where the empty shell of Serafim's Restaurant remains. The Warrington Zoning Hearing Board granted special permission Monday to Stephano Terra to expand the existing restaurant building by 720 square feet. Terra, manager of Ristorante Trevi in Northeast Philadelphia, has plans to open another Trevi's, serving gourmet Italian lunches and dinners. Since the first tavern was built there in 1952, the site has been something of a revolving door for different restaurant owners.

The meatball sandwiches and hoagies now sold for takeout in Whitemarsh Township are not necessarily Italian specialties, but chicken piccante, veal scaloppine and lasagna are. And, to back up his assertion that such specialties would be unique to the neighborhood, Michael Lepore brought menus from every eatery within a mile of his establishment to the Whitemarsh Zoning Hearing Board's meeting Monday.. Once persuaded that the service would indeed be unique to the neighborhood and that extra traffic would not be a hazard, the board unanimously approved, 5-0, a special exception for a sit-down section for Lepore's Italian Specialities.

Never in a hurry to hop, willy-nilly, on the trend wagon, Chestnut Hill may be ready at last for an upscale Italian restaurant. With that in mind, the old (since 1969) Twenty One West has become Ristorante Uzzolo, a name that - according to our office reference - translates to passion. Passion may be a bit strong for a three-room drinking and dining complex that has a piano bar at its core, but it's a tip-off that new owner Richard Allman is trying to put some pizazz into a neighborhood with a reputation for stodginess.

FOR DECADES, Philadelphians have chomped on cheesesteaks and noshed on soft pretzels. But could city residents actually develop a palette for horse meat? Chef Peter McAndrews thinks so. He recently announced plans to serve the equine delicacy at his Sicilian restaurant Monsu in Bella Vista, even as European food outlets deal with fallout from the discovery of horse DNA in beef products. "I like the idea of being an authentic Italian restaurant. When I heard the ban was lifted, I was very pleased," McAndrews said, referring to the ban on horse slaughter in the United States, which was lifted in 2011, when Congress reinstated federal funding for U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection of horse meat.

Two downtown restaurateurs - Rob Wasserman (Rouge, 500 Degrees) and chef Michael Schulson (Sampan, Izakaya) - have ventured into the Main Line with the Saint James (30 Parking Plaza, Ardmore, 610-649-6200), an American bistro in Suburban Square. Chris Sheffield of SLDesign created an open, lived-in look, with a skylight in the foyer, wooden tables, leather- and wool-covered booths, and white brick walls. It's an amalgam of Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel, with a dash of Anthropologie.

RALPH'S (760 S. 9th) IS HEADING to Valley Forge. Eddie Rubino , co-owner of the nation's oldest Italian restaurant, confirmed Tuesday that Ralph's of South Philly will open inside the new Sheraton Valley Forge when the hotel opens Sept. 27. "We are overwhelmed with excitement about this project finally coming to pass," Rubino said about his family's feelings toward the addition of a new location. The new Ralph's restaurant and bar will be open daily from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. It's not the first foray into the suburbs for Ralph's, which had a place in Ambler for several years.

EVER SINCE I wrote about Ralph's becoming the oldest Italian restaurant in the country, I've been hearing from foodies arguing that the title rightfully belongs to Dante & Luigi's. The owners of Ralph's claim their South Philly eatery, on 9th Street near Catharine, was founded in 1900. The owners of Dante and Luigi's, around the corner at 10th and Catherine, say their place has been in business since 1899. I hate getting things wrong — especially in print — so I'd like to set the record straight.

I AM, FIRST and foremost, a lover of all things Italian. But even I must acknowledge this: There are too damn many Italian restaurants in this city. Whenever I hear that a new trattoria or ristorante is about to open, the question immediately springs to mind: Does Philadelphia really need another Italian place? And yet — like seemingly everyone else — I always find myself anxiously awaiting the next one. Ah, la dolce vita, we never tire of you. But after waves of rustic BYOBs and old-school red-sauce joints and upscale pizzerias and fancy northern Italian spots, another question nagged at me: Are we running out of fresh Italian concepts?

Husband-wife veterans Guy Shapiro and Luli Canuso have been around the block a time or two after meeting at the once-trendy Mirabelle on Callowhill Street in the 1980s. She was a pastry chef at Le Bec-Fin. He cooked for Russian mobsters, among other employers. Now they have set up on a sunny corner near their Fairmount house with BlueCat (1921 Fairmount Ave., 267-519-2911). Named in homage to the couple's pussycat - who Canuso says "is a domestic gray but thinks he is a Russian blue" - the BYOB features modern Latin fare at modest prices.

SURE, BULLETS were flying in the barroom at Dante & Luigi's on Halloween night in 1989, when a masked man pulled a gun out of his trick-or-treat bag and starting pumping round after round into Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., son of the former Philadelphia mob boss. Before that, the Italian restaurant at 10th and Catharine streets was a hangout for Angelo Bruno, the mob boss who was killed outside his Snyder Avenue home in 1980 by a hitman with a shotgun. You'll still see a wiseguy having dinner there from time to time.

Try This: Traveling the Globe Without Leaving the Table By Danyelle Freeman HarperCollins. 287 pp. $16.99 I have a friend - actually several friends - who, when presented with the menu in an Italian restaurant, will order the chicken parm. Every time. There's nothing wrong with chicken parm, per se. It's the routine that irks me. Suggest that they try something else - and not the veal parm! - and they balk. Is it faintheartedness? Maybe. I think that many people are dissuaded by embarrassment.

East Passyunk Avenue in South Philadelphia was always the commercial heart of the old Italian neighborhood around it. You went to the butcher on "the Avenue" and also bought your clothes there, said Louis Casella, a longtime waiter at Marra's, the 80-year-old red-gravy standard opened by an Italian immigrant on Passyunk near Moore. "You still have the old-timers," Casella said. "But once, where they knew everybody on the Avenue," that's not the case now, Casella said, as trendy newcomers have moved in, drawn by the neighborhood's proximity to Center City and cheaper housing.

Media Borough may have had a wealth of dining options, as locals Greg Quintiliano and Alan Reh knew, but there was no Mexican restaurant. The friends fixed that shortcoming a few weeks ago with Dos Gringos (113 S. Olive St., Media, 610-565-7794), a BYOB in the former John's Place diner. Chef Don Koszowski, a former sous chef at Center City's Lolita, is going beyond ordinary, making everything from scratch, including turkey sausage and chorizo. It's open at 7 a.m. Mondays through Saturdays, serving breakfast till 11 a.m. and lunch till 2:30 p.m. Starting next week, dinner will be added Wednesdays through Saturdays.