This secret Italian restaurant serves more intrigue than flavor

Everyone wants to be in on Vita’s secret: A sultry Italian restaurant, it’s hidden, speakeasy-style, behind a Vespa-red refrigerator door inside a seemingly tiny gelateria near Rittenhouse Square. When this dining room surprise was revealed in late May, months after the gelateria opened, I lined up to land a table — after a little scoop of the gelateria’s silky dark chocolate sorbetto, of course.

Reservations have been a serious challenge to score, despite seating 100 in the former Branzino, with room for more still on the spacious brick patio. That demand is in no small part because Massimo Boni, who co-owns the restaurant with his wife, Ana Boni, has kept his thumb on the reservation scale as his kitchen and service team get up to speed, limiting availability on Resy to 20 or 30 openings per night in the beginning weeks, then easing up to 60, then 80, and now finally 100. There are currently no openings for two in the month of October. But based on my dining experiences at Vita — pastas in sludgy cream sauces, a litany of basic cooking gaffes, and some strange cocktails — this team still needs all the practice it can get.

Of course, the manufactured scarcity, cheekily hidden space, and Instagram-ready gimmick of the red fridge door are also pure catnip to Philly’s scene-hungry dinerati, who come dressed in their Big Night finery to sup in the low-lit aura of this long main dining room ringed by banquettes, gauzy white curtains, and pale walls shimmering with medallion-like copper plates.

The atmosphere is festive, sexy, and playful, including a neon mural outside the basement bathrooms full of iconic Italo-Philly symbols, from Rocky to the Liberty Bell. The service is genuinely warm and outgoing, even when you show up, as we did, on a night when the restaurant was understaffed and the food was flowing slower than usual. We took our seats at the tall bar, ripped a piece of the excellent warm focaccia and swiped leisurely through the tangy tomato butter. We’d been warned it could be a while.

Here’s the big catch: With all that anticipation and a $100-plus price tag per person for a meal, Vita has to deliver more than vibes. Italian restaurants make up the most competitive genre in Philadelphia, and other places that generate buzz from the intrigue of a low-key entrance and limited access — like the members only, cash only, molto-retro Palizzi Social Club — cannot thrive unless they deliver great food. And Vita, unfortunately, is no Palizzi Social Club.

I chalked up my first disappointing meal to first-month jitters, including the undercooked raw centers of the big head-on shrimp, which were graciously taken off my bill. Then there was the pistachio cocktail that came out not green, but the rusty hue of liquid bricks. (It’s all the bitters, the beverage manager told me.) The pastas are made in-house, but the range of preparations is limited, with five of the six sauces overly rich with ricotta, butter, or cream in a dairy-heavy style that felt out of fashion and dull.

The most appealing was the ricotta-filled balanzoni, which look like oversize green tortellini. But even that had caveats. Its filling is the same as the other stuffed pasta, the round bottoni, and the potential swagger of the house sausage garnish was dulled by a puddle of thick cream.

I waited nearly two months before I returned, as a last-minute walk-in off the Resy wait list. The results on the plate were no different, even though I was alerted by a colleague, who had been texted by a friend celebrating a birthday there, that I had been spotted by Vita’s staff: “Our waiter is all hyped.”

It’s too bad hype can’t cook the food. Simply knowing a critic is in the dining room rarely compensates for bigger issues plaguing a kitchen that has little feel for Italian cooking and is incapable of executing a menu consistently.

The meatballs were fried so hard and dry before they were braised in red sauce that the menu should call them golf balls marinara. The arancini tasted great, but the tomato-tinted risotto inside had been so lightly par-cooked before being shaped into deep-fried balls that grains of half-cooked rice kept lodging in my molars. The TikTok-popular ricotta toast got extra points for the use of Mighty Bread sourdough, but the cheese — intended to be sweet and savory — was so oversweetened with honey it would have been more at home inside a cannoli for dessert.

I took a deep drink of my Living La Vida Loca cocktail for a mezcal-Negroni cleanse only to get a mouthful of dried rose petals that had been cradled in the curve of its lemon zest garnish. It was like drinking a basket of potpourri. Then came the pastas, and things really took a turn for the worse.

The bucatini all’Amatriciana was ruined by a tomato sauce that was acrid with the flavor of scorched guanciale bits. I loved the choice of ruffle-edged mafaldine pasta ribbons for cacio e pepe, but instead of a silky ivory cheese sauce sparked by toasty nuggets of coarsely crushed peppercorns, this thick cream was gunmetal gray from powdered pepper, which overwhelmed all other flavors with a bitter burn. Even a potential slam dunk like rigatoni alla vodka fell flat due to an elemental production mistake with the thick house rigatoni: adding eggs to the pasta dough. Egg noodles are best when put through a roller, because it’s a more delicate process. As Marc Vetri has told me on more than one occasion, eggs tend to add too much protein for a dough that gets pushed through a high-pressure extruder, which can render the noodles tough and gummy. That’s why these thick rigatoni bent with an elastic chew rather than an al dente snap.

It was at about this moment a plate of grilled prawns arrived as an apology for the undercooked version on our first visit. Boni is nothing if not charming, humble, and gracious. They were delicious this time, glowing warm with chili oil and fennel. They were also fully cooked.

We also had slightly better luck with the large-format cooked items for sharing, including a juicy, crisp-skinned chicken over polenta, as well as a tender 18 ounce bistecca alla Fiorentina sourced from Esposito’s that was a flavorful cut for $64.

But the red snapper alla puttanesca was a deal-breaker. The kitchen was so focused on mastering sukibiki, a Japanese technique of slicing the scales off a fish with a sharp knife to foster a crispy skin, that it forgot to take care with the rest of the dish. The skin was definitely snappy, but the fish itself was grilled so hard beneath a weight that it was as tough and dry as wood. The puttanesca on the side, meanwhile, bungled a traditional sauce into a caricature of unbalanced, chaotic harshness, the salty brine of kalamatas and briny anchovy paste bumping against chunky tomatoes, the crunch of coarse-cut onions, and a punch of raw garlic that lingered for an hour after the meal.

A hundred scoops of gelato might not have been enough to erase it. Three scoops would have to do, and as I spooned into this trio with that dark chocolate sorbetto, a creamy honeyed mascarpone, and a vividly nutty pistachio (yes, it was even green!), I was glad to be reminded that gelato chef Matthew Cocco knows what he’s doing.

There’s so much potential here — and an eager audience. But as we emerged onto South 17th Street right beside the gelateria, I glimpsed that red refrigerator door and decided that the secret Vita is hiding no longer seemed so tempting.

261 S. 17th St., Phila., Pa. 19103; vitainphilly.com

Dinner Thursday through Sunday, 5 to 9 p.m. Beginning in October, dinner will be served until 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Gelateria open Tuesday through Thursday, noon to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, until 10 p.m. Closed Sunday.

Plates $23-$64.

Gluten-free options (including pasta) are available, and care is taken to avoid cross contamination.

Wheelchair accessible through rear alleyway entrance, with an accessible bathroom also on that floor.