Danny DiGiampietro is turning Angelo’s Pizzeria from Philly icon into an empire — if he can pull it off

Good morning, bread heads!

Danny DiGiampietro’s cheery greeting drowns out the classic rock filling his truck as he zigzags through the darkness of rowhouse South Philadelphia. It’s the sleepy side of 5 a.m. He’s headed to his shop, Angelo’s Pizzeria, on Ninth Street near the Italian Market, and he’s narrating his workday on Instagram, as usual.

DiGiampietro unleashes a 30-second stream-of-consciousness soliloquy about the Eagles’ recent reversal of fortune. Cut to the next Instagram story: a close-up video of steak rolls being pulled from an oven while he roars with pride.

Angelo’s crusty, well-developed rolls — tawny, seeded, and tender inside yet sturdy enough to overstuff — have become the benchmark for cheesesteaks and hoagies in the town where they were invented. It’s rare for a sandwich shop to bake its own rolls in-house, and DiGiampietro’s exacting standards yield “absolute perfection,” said Jim Kantner, an administrator of the Cheesesteak Gurus Facebook group, whose more than 90,000 members can’t say enough about Angelo’s.

Angelo’s pizzas have also ranked high on every local “best of” list since Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports walked in a few months after its 2019 opening, bought a plain cheese, took one bite, and gave it a 9.1 rating (“spectacular”). Crowds — truly, crowds — followed, as did athletes and celebrities. And they never left.

Five years in, DiGiampietro — let’s call him Danny, because nobody bothers tripping over DiGiampietro — has embarked on an audacious expansion of Angelo’s. In October, he opened a ghost kitchen on Girard Avenue in North Philadelphia with UberEats to deliver Angelo’s pizzas, hoagies, cheesesteaks, and specialty sandwiches throughout much of the city. In November, he debuted Uncle Gus’ Steaks at Reading Terminal Market with market merchants Joe Nicolosi of DiNic’s and Dave Braunstein of Pearl’s Oyster Bar.

The next stop is Manhattan, where Danny is opening Danny & Coop’s in partnership with actor Bradley Cooper. The pair met several years ago when the Abington-raised Cooper walked into Angelo’s, cap pulled down, and ordered a cheesesteak, sparking a lasting bromance.

More Angelo’s locations — Danny isn’t sure how many — are also planned throughout the Philadelphia region.

No one, not even Danny — especially Danny, perhaps — knows where it will end. As anyone who’s watched a beloved restaurant scale from one location into a chain knows, expansion is a path filled with pitfalls. Can Danny grow a single shop into a Philly food empire? Or, as the legions of Angelo’s fans would probably put it, can Angelo’s get bigger without sacrificing the quality of the pizza, hoagies, and steaks that made it an icon?

“You have to know that Danny doesn’t give a s— about money,” Louis Sarcone Jr., one of his best friends and a now-semiretired local baking legend, said. “He’s doing what he’s doing just because he loves doing this.”

Danny could have settled down with one successful pizzeria, but he chose to go all in — funding the expansion himself, with no outside investors. Why? “It’s a fair question,” Danny said. “My therapist said that I have ADHD and I love risk. But I only like risk [when I’m] betting on myself.”

The creative process delights him, as well. “I love taking an idea, sitting around a table and talking about it and throwing out ideas and the excitement of what it could be and the building of it when it starts,” he said. “You get the place and you get the key and it’s a [dump] and you transform it into something beautiful and then …” He paused. “Then it just comes to life.”

“Number two, I’m surrounded by good people and I don’t want to lose them,” Danny said. “We all get along and have a common goal.” He likened the atmosphere at Angelo’s to that of a pirate ship: a hotbed of eager cooks and bakers, with plenty of strong personalities. The expansion will allow him to promote his stars and keep his crew together. “We’re getting health benefits for everybody,” he said. “We’re feeling like a real company.”

Still, Danny said he is girding himself for the skeptics who will say, “‘Oh, my God. They’re expanding. It’s gonna be s–.’”

His voice rose. “Nobody’s tougher on me than me, and there’s some tough people out there,” he said. “I will work till I die to make sure I’m doing the best that I can, and I root for everybody else out there. I’m not trying to be the best. It’s not for me to decide who is the best in anything. But I guarantee you that my team will try our [gosh darn] best.”

Danny, 52, grew up at his father’s pizzeria in South Philadelphia, stretching scraps of dough over bare lightbulbs to create his own “pizza.”

Back then, his father, Armand, called him Danny Disaster. “I’d get a new bike and crash it and break it on the first day, or my grandmother would buy me Matchbox cars and I’d go in my father’s garage and crush them in a vise,” Danny said.

Following a childhood spent in a corner pizzeria, Danny dreamed of becoming a Michelin-star chef. After high school, he moved to Miami to attend Johnson & Wales University for culinary training. He returned home one summer, and while waiting to intern at Le Bec-Fin, he helped his friend Michael Abruzzi at the family’s namesake bakery. Fascinated by bread, Danny stayed on.

One day, Danny and a friend drove to South Jersey for a barbecue at the home of a jobber — a middleman who buys bread from various bakeries and distributes it to restaurants and pizzerias. He thought he had pulled up to the wrong house, until he recognized the jobber’s beat-up delivery van in the open garage. “It looked like a mansion,” he said.

Danny told Abruzzi that he wanted to buy a bread route. The catch: He didn’t have $100,000. “I told him, ‘Give me some samples and I’ll make up my own bread route,’” he said.

Danny signed up customers in South Jersey, and began delivering bread from Abruzzi’s and other bakeries, including Sarcone’s, which set the previous standard for rolls two decades ago. Working his routes, he started to wonder: If he could make money delivering bread, “imagine what I could do if I make it,” he said.

During pickups at Sarcone’s, Danny met his now-wife, Lauren, a granddaughter of Louis Sarcone Sr., and married into Italian bread royalty. Making deliveries at DiNic’s, he found his bakery: Joe Nicolosi and his father, Tommy, talked him into buying Coppola’s, a South Philadelphia bakery that was closing.

Around 2005, DiGiampietro’s Bake Shoppe became a reality — and a disaster. For years, Danny drove by day and baked by night. He didn’t sleep. The route was a money-maker, but the bakery wasn’t. “I know how to make bread, just not money making bread,” Danny said. “It ruined my life.”

In 2012, Danny passed a shuttered pizzeria on Haddon Avenue in Haddonfield. Assuring Lauren that he could make it profitable in a year, he gave up DiGiampietro’s Bake Shoppe and in 2013 opened the original Angelo’s Pizzeria, naming it after their infant son. It caught on with the public — and Danny kept delivering bread — but money remained tight. “He used to borrow money to go back and forth over the bridge,” Louis Sarcone Jr., who is also his wife’s uncle, said.

In 2017, Sarcone’s Deli, just up the block from Sarcone’s Bakery in South Philadelphia, became available. Danny struck a deal with the Sarcones to take over the space. He gave up the bread route at the end of 2018, closed the Haddonfield shop, and reopened in South Philadelphia in January 2019 after extensive repairs.

Nine days after opening, Danny was at home asleep when his alarm company called to report a fire. A floor beam beneath the oven had begun smoldering, and firefighters chopped into it to extinguish the smoke.

“We are a wood-fired pizza joint,” he joked on Instagram.

Twelve days and thousands of dollars in repairs later, Angelo’s was back in business. He had a routine in those first months on Ninth Street in 2019: Each day he’d make whatever he could and sell whatever he could. He’d clean, lock up, and go home. Sellouts were frequent. Then came Dave Portnoy and his camera crew, followed by the hungry hordes.

Maybe it was maturity, but as Danny plotted his future, “I knew I couldn’t do it myself,” he said. “It was all Jared.”

Jared Braunstein, 35, a younger brother of Dave Braunstein at Pearl’s Oyster Bar, was one of Danny’s first hires at Ninth Street. “He’s organized,” Danny said. “I don’t like paperwork. I like cooking. That’s all I like doing. Jared would say we’re getting killed on these sandwiches. I never knew how to cost out a sandwich.”

Braunstein is now a partner. Asked what it’s like working with Danny, Jared grinned. “I’ll say that whatever plan you got in the morning, throw it in the trash,” he said. “When you work with Danny, you are dealing with everything as it comes, second by second.”

Several months ago, Danny also brought on as partners two restaurant executives versed in operations and scaling food businesses. Mark Hellyar was the corporate research development chef for all of Stephen Starr’s restaurants; when Starr was setting up, say, Le Diplomate or Makoto, or when the menu at Pod needed a refresh, Hellyar went in. Manuel Martinez spent more than 13 years managing restaurants for Starr, most recently LMNO. He oversees the new company’s day-to-day operations. Danny’s longtime friend Dom Rahatt, whose background is in the mortgage industry, is a financial adviser, helping to negotiate business deals.

Seth Braunstein, the youngest of the three Braunstein brothers, oversees Ninth Street, allowing Danny to work on the expansion with Hellyar, Martinez, and Jared. “Manuel knows systems and it’s unbelievable the way Mark’s brain works with food,” Danny said. “This is all brand new to them. They’re high end. They were not in the cheesesteaks and pizza and sandwiches and stuff like that.”

They call the company AGNB Hospitality — “all gas, no brakes,” one of Danny’s pet expressions.

Danny has made plans before, but never this big. And for these big plans, he needs more bread. Lots more bread than he can crank out of a century-old, 17-foot-wide rowhouse crammed with grills, ovens, and racks. He recently began baking rolls out of the former Conshohocken Italian Bakery, one of the region’s largest commercial bakeries before it closed in October after 51 years. Now dubbed Angelo’s Baking Co., it produces rolls for the Angelo’s delivery kitchen and Uncle Gus’, and will eventually serve new Angelo’s locations as well. (The Angelo’s in South Philadelphia continues to bake its own bread; so will Danny & Coop’s in New York.)

In time, Danny hopes to sell pizza and bread to customers via retail counter at Angelo’s Baking Co., just like Conshohocken Bakery once did. The idea of serving the locals in Conshohocken brings back memories. “When the kids say, ‘Mom, make us lunch,’ and she goes, ‘All right, run to the bakery and get a half-dozen rolls,’ that’s [the vibe] we want,” he said.

Being all gas and no brakes has its drawbacks. In the UberEats kitchen’s earliest days, the bakers could not keep up with the demand for rolls and the online shop had to stop selling sandwiches.

The new bakery is addressing the shortages, allowing the UberEats kitchen to increase hours.

Still, UberEats’ customer ratings have been tepid. “We went through a little bit of a struggle at the beginning,” Danny said. “A lot of it is on us and a lot of it is on the process of the food getting to the people. About 10 weeks ago, the Eagles were 2-2 and everybody wanted to fire [general manager] Howie [Roseman] and [coach] Nick Sirianni, and now look at them. The Eagles got it right. We’re working on getting it right, and all will be forgotten. But like everything, there’s gonna be growing pains. Bryce Harper doesn’t hit a home run every time he’s up.”

“People who know me know what I went through and where I’ve been,” Danny said one morning as he pulled rolls out of an oven in South Philly. “I’ve been high and I’ve been low and I’ve been really low.”

A longtime commercial baker, now retired, called Danny recently to catch up. He was happy for Danny’s success. “He saw me in my darkest of times when I was broke,” Danny said. “I mean, I was borrowing money from him to buy my family groceries. And I told him I’m just blessed to be where I am.”

Maybe Danny, too, could retire someday.

Danny laughed at the thought. “My retirement would look like dropping my kids off at school in the morning, going to the golf course, playing a round of golf, having lunch with some guys, come to the shop, work for a little while, and be home for dinner with my wife and kids,” he said.

Danny’s mother, Ruthy, who handles the register on Fridays, is 83. “We don’t retire in this family,” she said. “We work. That’s what we do.”

Cooking is “really the only thing I’m pretty good at and I love it all,” Danny said. “I get to be creative. Some people can play the guitar, some people can play the drums or paint a picture to express themselves. I do it through bread and sandwiches and pizzas.”

Still, Danny said that he was spending more time with his family recently as he delegates to Jared Braunstein and his people. “I’m a better husband,” he said, sliding rolls into boxes. “Well, I don’t know if I’m a better husband. I’m definitely a more present father, that’s for sure. My kids are 12 and 13, and for the first 11 years of both their lives, I was a myth, like, ‘Who’s this guy ‘Daddy’ you’re talking about?’” (Lauren DiGiampietro declined to comment for this article.)

Angelo and daughter Luciana turned up on another morning’s Instagram story when Danny was dropping them at school. He had been regaling them with dad jokes for the ride, and they wore big smiles as they climbed out of the truck. “That makes the rest of their day a lot easier,” he told his audience.

Danny pulled another rack of rolls from the oven and slid them into a box.

“I gotta keep moving,” he said. “I gotta keep dreaming. I gotta keep busy. So listen. If it all blows up in my face, f– it. At least I can look back and say I tried.”