A high-school trip to Italy sparked Anthony’s Italian Coffee House in Philadelphia’s South Ninth Street Italian Market. “I fell in love with the cafe culture,” Anthony Anastasio recalled about those two weeks in 1989. “I was born and raised at the market, and it was some- thing the market was missing.” He has since built the business on the legacy of his parents’, grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ businesses in the market and his degree in food marketing from St. Joseph’s University.

Anthony’s was bold idea in when it opened in 1995, when Philadelphia’s outdoor markets were declining, stay-at-home mothers were no longer shopping daily (they weren’t staying at home, either), stalwarts like Maggio cheese and D’Orazio pasta had outgrown the market, families were encouraging children to pursue the American dream via higher education and white-collar jobs, and Vietnamese immigrants were moving in.