Salvatore Vetri, retired jeweler and father figure to Philadelphia restaurant community, has died at 87

Salvatore Vetri, 87, a retired business owner and real estate broker, and father figure to the Philadelphia restaurant community, died unexpectedly Wednesday at his home on Rittenhouse Square of natural causes, his family said.

Mr. Vetri — Sal or Salvy to everyone — was the father of Risa Vetri Ferman, a Montgomery County Common Pleas Court judge and former district attorney; Marc Vetri, a James Beard Award-winning chef; and Adam Vetri, a Los Angeles-based producer and director of such TV series as Barmageddon, The Amazing Race, and Getaway Driver.

He and his wife, Barbara, a lawyer, would have been married for 64 years next month. They lived on Rittenhouse Square after raising their family in Rydal.

Mr. Vetri owned the Crown Jewels and Dazzles jewelry stores, which had 35 storefront and mall kiosk locations in the region.

After he sold the businesses in 1994, “he just totally ingrained himself in his kids’ lives,” said Jeff Benjamin, Marc Vetri’s business partner. That included nearly 20 years of cooking pre-shift meals for Vetri’s restaurant staff and helping with Vetri Community Partnership, the nonprofit that enriches minds, bodies, and communities through nutrition and cooking.

Marc Vetri got the news of his father’s death while on a trip to his restaurant in Kyoto, Japan. “Before I left for Japan, I met him for coffee, and when I left I said, ‘See you in a week, Pop,’” Marc Vetri said. “Usually I kiss him on the head, but this time, he got up and gave me the biggest hug and said, ‘I love you so much.’ I will always remember that last coffee.”

One of Mr. Vetri’s legacies is his meatballs. Earlier this year, Marc Vetri and Benjamin opened Pizzeria Salvy, named in his father’s honor, at the Comcast Technology Center. Its logo bears a pair of thick-templed Martin Scorsese glasses, a Sal Vetri trademark. The menu features pizzas and the meatballs, whose recipe Mr. Vetri freely gave out. (Tip: Toss them in all-purpose flour as you work, and keep a bowl of water handy to minimize stickiness while you roll.)

Mr. Vetri, the son of Sicilian immigrants, was born July 17, 1936, and had a modest upbringing at Seventh and League Streets in South Philadelphia — 3½ blocks from what is now Marc Vetri’s pasta bar, Fiorella. As a teen, he worked in the slaughterhouse at Esposito’s on Ninth Street. After graduating from Temple University, he served as a cook in the Army. “The high-ranking soldiers and officers wanted to go to his mess hall because he always had the best gravy,” said Adam, the younger son. “His meatballs were famous back then.”

He met Barbara Rotenberg while she hostessed at her father’s Center City restaurant, Maurice’s. But, as Barbara Vetri said, “he was getting too serious, too soon, and I was ready to go to law school and didn’t want any entanglements.” That year, she got a summer job at the Shore, where Mr. Vetri was working. “He helped me get the job,” she said. “I’ve called it ‘Love Behind the Steam Table.’”

Mr. Vetri was born Roman Catholic and Barbara is Jewish. He converted, and they were married in a rabbi’s study on Christmas Eve 1959.

Adam Vetri said his father wanted to go into business after the Army, but didn’t know what to do. “It’s not like he had this desire to be a jeweler, per se, but he was trying to figure out what was the business that he could start with the least amount of money,” he said.

“Success never changed who he was,” Adam Vetri said. “He’s just a city guy who worked his way to the top.”

“Work was his essence,” Barbara Vetri said. “He worked hard. He pushed.”

He backed his children’s careers tirelessly. “The summer when I was 15 years old, he got me a job at a jewelry store at a pier in Atlantic City,” Marc Vetri said. “I told him I already got a job as a dishwasher at Downbeach Deli, and that’s what I wanted to do. The rest is history. He didn’t get it at first, but he did eventually.” (When his children were teenagers, Mr. Vetri himself tasted the restaurant business briefly in 1982 with a Belgian waffle and ice cream shop called Jennie’s, named after his mother, in Queen Village.)

“The main thing to know is that he was a mentor,” Adam Vetri said. “We all had childhood friends, high school friends, work friends, college friends — all of these people, they call him Salvy. They’d go have a coffee with him. They’re not calling me, Marc, and Risa. I’ll get a text from friends saying, ‘Hey, I had lunch with your pop the other day.’ He just connected with people.”

Benjamin met Mr. Vetri through son Adam over tuna subs at Dino’s in Margate, N.J., years before Benjamin and Marc Vetri opened Vetri Cucina in Center City in 1998. The older man and up-and-coming restaurateur struck up a conversation, and a friendship was born.

“He enveloped us in love,” said Ferman, his first-born, who followed her mother into law. “My dad really gave us confidence to believe in ourselves and to follow our dreams. He taught us the value of a person’s word. He taught us the importance of hard work and integrity. He taught us probably most importantly to believe in ourselves and to use the skills and gifts that we had to achieve our goals.”

Mr. Vetri liked few things more than cooking. In 1999, Adam Vetri was in New York filming Not Afraid to Say, his first independent feature, on a $200,000 budget. His father and brother crowded into his tiny apartment. “He’d be in there making egg sandwiches for the crew in the morning, and would sit around, making sure everybody had something to eat while we’re running through the streets,” Adam Vetri said.

Mr. Vetri became renowned locally for cooking pre-shift meals for staff of his son’s restaurants, such as Amis. Workers would come in on their days off, Benjamin said. “Having coffee with Sal will forever be some of my favorite memories,” said Drew DiTomo, chef de cuisine at Amis, which closed in 2019.

“You’re talking about close to just shy of a thousand employees that he touched in some way in our organization,” Benjamin said Wednesday. “I’m getting calls from people who used to work for us 10 years ago.”

Frequently, Mr. Vetri was accompanied in the kitchen by retired Inquirer food columnist Rick Nichols. “I looked forward to doing the grunt work, like chopping mushrooms,” Nichols said. “He was a joy. We turned staff meals into a festive occasion.” Before Mr. Vetri’s 80th birthday, Marc Vetri commissioned a video of the two working at Amis.

Besides his wife and children, he is survived by nine grandchildren, a great-grandson, his brother, Paul, and aunt Elvera Albano.

Services will begin at 11:30 a.m. Friday at Goldsteins’ Rosenberg’s Raphael Sacks, 6410 N. Broad St. Burial will be in Montefiore Cemetery, Jenkintown.

Donations in his memory may be made to Vetri Community Partnership, 915 Spring Garden St., Philadelphia 19123, or to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.