Have a favorite restaurant sign? These are the two men who (probably) painted it

At Borromini, perched on a busy Rittenhouse corner, hand-painted flourishes help situate the trattoria’s pan-Italian menu within Philadelphia’s buzzy food scene.

Gibbs Connors painted the lettering on the transom windows, gilded in two kinds of gold leaf against pomodoro red. The aesthetics establish the restaurant’s ambitions of culinary grandeur before you even step inside; dazzling to assert, visually, that some focaccia could make your vita a little more dolce.

Starr Restaurants, which owns Borromini, first hired Connors in 1993 for work on a neon sign at the Spring Garden nightclub the Bank. Then, for an Old City restaurant called the Continental, and then for every Starr restaurant in Philadelphia several times over.

“If you could combine Rip Van Winkle and Yoda, that’s Gibbs,” said Michael Palermo, VP of development and facilities for Starr Restaurants.

Connors, 63, grew up in Troy, N.Y., and settled in Philadelphia in 1989, a few years after graduating from the Pratt Institute. Within a year or two of arriving in Philly, he found a steady gig at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which included everything from hand-lettering trash cans and bathroom doors, to screen-printing Picasso and de Chirico on gallery walls.

He got the job, he said, because he didn’t leave pencil lines on the walls.

Connors has since gone on to make his mark on glass, wood, brick, concrete, and metal all over the city.

He has hand-painted signage for hundreds of restaurants, bars, hotels, and other businesses; from cafes, tattoo shops, and single-store boutiques to large-and-growing Philadelphia institutions like the Barnes Foundation, La Colombe, and the Schulson Collective.

The demand for his work, he said, has remained steady because hand-painted signage communicates a business’ values, especially in hospitality.

“We can tell you where these tomatoes came from, we can tell you where those pork chops came from, and we can tell you who painted the sign,” Connors said.

In 2014, sensing a growing cadre of sign painters in the area, Connors convened the artists he could find for a “goodwill meeting.” The developing style of one young artist, Christian Cantiello, caught his eye.

The others have since mostly given up the practice or left the area — it’s difficult to maintain a business while constantly finding and generating new jobs — but Cantiello and Connors still collaborate frequently.

On their first job together, Cantiello asked Connors to teach him how to gild, a technique of laying down impossibly thin gold sheets in lieu of paint. Connors had learned the finicky practice from his own mentors, Roderick Treece and Robert Freese.

“Now it’s my job to pass it on,” Connors said. “Christian says I knew him for five years before I took him out on a gold leaf job. So it’s not so much passing it on. It’s, ‘Who’s worthy of learning this stuff?’”

When Lauren Biederman opened her gourmet grocery, Biederman’s Specialty Foods, in 2020, she hired Cantiello to paint the hanging sign, the windows, and her Vespa. For the opening of her new raw bar Tesiny last year, she had him take the creative lead on signage.

He suggested moving the restaurant’s name from the door to the six-pane transom above it — one per letter — with a wordless logo on the door and an iridescent inlay of green sea snail abalone shell.

“I love everything to match perfectly, but I’m glad that it doesn’t exactly match here,” Biederman said. “We have some blues and a bunch of different hues from the shell that hit differently in the light, which I was a little bit hesitant about. He just said to sit with it for a while, and so many people were like, ‘It looks great.’”

Cantiello, 43, grew up in South Philadelphia, where he still lives. He studied graphic design at Hussian College but worked in the service industry for a while after graduating.

Working as a bartender, he started making signs at Manny Brown’s around 2010, in chalk and marker, and met Connors within a couple of years. He got a gig painting a sign at Nelson’s Ice Cream in Royersford and took a week off work to do it. He had another painting job lined up before that one was done, and then another.

He never went back to the bar.

After about a year of steady jobs, Cantiello founded Keystone Sign & Co., a one-man operation that often partners with Connors’ Standard Sign Co. If either gets contacted for a job, they’ll usually suggest working on it together, or one will hire the other to help.

“Anytime we need an extra set of hands, we’re always right there for each other,” Cantiello said.

Both Cantiello and Connors get jobs around the country but mostly work in Philadelphia.

Cantiello estimates he’s done about 20 projects a year dating to 2013. Connors has “absolutely no idea” how many he’s done.

Neither maintains much of an archive of their work. Neither uses a calendar.

The work itself requires a precise hand and refined technique as well as working knowledge of color theory and building materials. The installation usually takes a few days at most, but the impact grows over time.

The painting will weather, but the patina and discoloration can add richness and character, showing continuity where a peeling machine-made sign might communicate dilapidation or disrepair.

“There’s a little saying among sign painters: ‘Paint ages, vinyl dies,’” Cantiello said.

Cantiello and Connors do most of their work for food and hospitality in part because that’s what they’ve always done, and most of their jobs come from satisfied customers and their referrals.

“We like to be the guys that help them get off to their start,” Connors said. “With Stephen Starr and with Spread Bagelry and with La Colombe, all of them started with one business.”

“We always try to find something for Gibbs on a project,” from hand-painted bathrooms to lettering on light fixtures to hotel room numbers, said Kate Rohrer, interior designer and owner of Rohe Creative, which specializes in restaurants and hotels. “He’s one of the coolest dudes I know,” she said of Connors, whom she first hired 10 years ago.

For any new business, the walls and windows have to go up before anyone can paint them, so the painters are often still working during the last few hectic days before opening. But a steady hand comes from a stoic constitution.

“Having Gibbs there is a welcome respite,” Rohrer said. “He brings such a chill vibe to our projects.”

Connors is tough to rattle even when he’s literally dangling in the wind, as he did when Rohrer hired him to paint the giant Harbisons Dairy milk bottle that looms over Fishtown and Kensington.

“That was a 185-foot boom lift,” Connors said. “I enjoy being up there. Now, coming down, when you get down on the ground and for the next few days in bed, it’s a little terrifying.”

A few years ago, Connors brought Cantiello along for a job in Syracuse on a sign roughly six stories up.

They started in the snow and finished in the dark. Working from a swing stage like a window washer might use, with cars zipping past on I-81 below them, Cantiello got a little nervous, but Connors was there to help him settle down.

“If you start thinking about how high up you are, then you can’t do anything,” Connors said. “If you focus on right in front of you where you’re working, you don’t know if your feet are on the ground or 70 feet in the air.

“Just focus.”