Delco couple keeps their babies’ memories alive with new restaurant

When Steve and Jenna DeVito decided to go into the restaurant business two years ago, they already had the name.

It would be Dom & Mia’s, to hold onto the memories of their children Domenico James and Mia Isabella, both of whom died as infants due to complications of premature birth. Dom, born 12½ weeks early in 2017, died of necrotizing enterocolitis at two weeks, while Mia, born in 2019 at nearly 26 weeks, had a suspected umbilical cord issue and died at 2 days old.

On April 29, the couple — now parents of Emma, 3, and Vincenzo, 9 months — will open Dom & Mia’s at 145 Saxer Ave. in Springfield, Delaware County.

The location is a former PNC bank branch on a bustling commercial strip. The vault, behind the bar, houses the inventory of wine and spirits — a convenient and secure location. Old safe-deposit boxes are built into the front of the bar. There are 90 seats in the dining room, with plenty of room outdoors on a patio across from the Saxer Avenue Station of the SEPTA Route 101 trolley.

Steve DeVito, 36, managed restaurants out of college but became an insurance underwriter. Jenna DeVito, 35, is a sales analyst for a software company and runs Cathie Collins School of Dance, in Aldan and Glen Mills.

He said he had thought about opening his own business, but not necessarily a restaurant.

The inspiration for Dom & Mia’s came as a bolt from the blue.

“It was honestly just a weird feeling — not something I experienced before,” he said. “I can tell you the exact day: June 24, 2020. I had just dropped my daughter off at dance school and I was making a left onto Baltimore Pike off Oak Avenue. I just kept thinking about it and it wouldn’t go away. Then I brought [the idea] to Jenna.”

“My immediate thought was that he was crazy because it was COVID and all the restaurants had just shut down,” Jenna said.

“I said, ‘I’m not opening a restaurant tomorrow,’” Steve said. He knew it would take time to open.

With business partner Matt White, they secured the location and retrofitted it with an open kitchen. They waited out the bulk of the pandemic.

Their expansive menu, which bears a red-gravy Italian influence, includes French onion soup, stromboli egg rolls, Guinness-braised beef short rib wontons, and lollipop lamb chops as starters, with sandwiches, pizzas, and such entrées ($17 to $37) as Creole meatballs, roast chicken, spinach gnocchi, bone-in rib-eye, Duroc bone-In pork chop, and vegan shoyu-smoked tofu.

This project is Delco all the way. The couple met in grade school in Upper Darby and attended Monsignor Bonner and Archbishop Prendergast High in Drexel Hill. (They dated back then, broke up, and reconnected after college.) Their chef, Joseph McIntyre, also grew up in Upper Darby.

The partners plan to make the restaurant an active community participant, with events focused on various charities. The DeVitos created TeamDOMinate, which to date has raised about $150,000 to support the March of Dimes Foundation.

Opening a restaurant is all about risk, Steve DeVito acknowledged, aware of his former career in the insurance business. He feels that opening Dom & Mia’s is a risk worth taking.

“That’s not to say we were super comfortable with it, but there was a time and point in our lives where I thought it was time to get uncomfortable, to try and do something special,” he said. “It’s been hard, but that’s also good. Doing something hard and challenging helped me. This whole process has been therapeutic. It kind of jolted me back. It gave me a reason to challenge myself.”