To hear Marcello DeFeo, the owner and operator of Valente’s Italian Specialties tell it, meal time when growing up in a tight-knit Italian-American household was hardly a private affair. “We had an open-table policy in our kitchen where we constantly had our friends from school, or my dad’s clients. My nonna or my mom would invite them to come sit down to eat with us. It was amazing to watch them, since they would fill up on a massive bowl of pasta and not know there was three more courses of food to come,” he said.

Valente was the surname of DeFeo’s maternal grandparents, who emigrated to Philadelphia from Bisenti in the region of Abruzzo in the early 20th century. His nonna, Paola Valente, who lived with his family in the Girard Estates section of South Philadelphia, had the greatest influence on his love of cooking, sense of family, and need for his friends to experience the joys he knew on a daily basis.