Another fixture of East Passyunk’s Italian dining legacy is on the market

The tables at Mamma Maria’s have not been pushed aside for dancing in years, but the disco ball still hangs overhead.

Still there, too, are the kitchen where Santa Maria “Mamma Maria” Chiavatti turned out feather-light gnocchi, the dining room where waiters carried trays of flaming sambuca, and the upstairs studio where Chiavatti taped a TV cooking show whose first guest in 1999 was Mayor Ed Rendell.

Now the collection of buildings that housed the East Passyunk restaurant for nearly three decades is for sale, marking the end of one of the Avenue’s more colorful links to its ′90s/’00s Italian-restaurant resurgence.

The former restaurant, closed for six years, is spread across three adjoining buildings on Passyunk Avenue and Jessup Street, all with apartments above. The asking price for 1637 E. Passyunk Ave., which houses one of the dining rooms, and 1632 S. Jessup St., which contains the kitchen, is $1.5 million. The building housing the other dining room, at 1639 E. Passyunk Ave., is offered for $2 million.

“The kitchen is still set up,” said Albert Perry of Century 21 Advantage Gold, who has the listing with Dave Lombardo. “When we went to the property for the listing appointment, I was sent home with food.”

Mamma Maria’s, which opened in 1992 and expanded into the adjoining property the following year, closed in 2020. But the Chiavattis said they couldn’t bring themselves to sell until now.

“We want to give somebody the chance to have what we had, but with their vision,” said Maria’s daughter Paola Chiavatti. “Our era is ending, and a new era can begin.”

The Chiavattis’ Philadelphia era began almost by accident.

Maria and her husband, Claudio, came to the United States from Italy in 1992 for what their children believed was a vacation. The couple had already spent years in the restaurant business in Italy and Canada, and the family thought they had retired.

Then, while visiting relatives in Philadelphia, Claudio spotted a closed restaurant on East Passyunk Avenue and noticed the municipal parking lot across the street.

“I said, ‘Yes, but it isn’t your parking lot,’” Maria recalled.

Claudio’s answer was simple: “But it is there.”

The couple rented the building and opened Mamma Maria’s. Three months later, Claudio questioned why they were paying rent when they could buy it.

“That’s exactly what we did,” Maria said. “We bought it and made it beautiful.”

They built the menu around the food Maria knew from Abruzzo.

Paola, meanwhile, was still in Italy, working as an interpreter and language teacher. Her sister, Myrna, and brother, Gianni, came to visit their parents. Before long, everyone in the immediate family was in Philadelphia, except Paola.

That same year, her parents invited her over, ostensibly for a relative’s birthday party. Claudio picked her up at the airport and drove her to East Passyunk Avenue. She walked into the restaurant and saw a banner: “Welcome, Paola, to Mamma Maria’s.”

Claudio told her that he and Maria had fallen in love with the neighborhood and the city. The restaurant, he said, would be something for their old age.

Paola said she understood what was expected of her. Arrivederci, Italy.

“Thirty-four years later, here I am,” she said.

Mamma Maria’s was a family operation in the most literal sense. Maria cooked. Claudio hosted, baked, prepped, and made sauces. Paola and Myrna worked the dining room.

For much of its run, Mamma Maria’s was known for an enormous fixed-price meal: antipasto, soup, multiple pastas, meat and seafood entrees, salad, vegetables, potatoes, and a dessert cart loaded with cakes, cannoli, and other sweets.

Wine was complimentary. So, at first, was flaming sambuca, served while an accordion player named Mario circulated among the tables.

“You sat down and you felt like you were having Christmas dinner or New Year’s Eve dinner at your house,” said Lilla Amico-Carlomango, Maria’s oldest granddaughter, who worked at the restaurant with sisters Dalia and Chiara Amico. “The staff, the clients, everybody was so happy to be here that it created one big family.”

Shortly after it opened, Inquirer food critic Elaine Tait described the cooking as “homey, not haute, cuisine, the likes of which you might find cooked by someone’s talented Italian mom.”

Inquirer columnist Jim Quinn was similarly enthusiastic. Maria didn’t know Quinn from Adam when someone told her there was a man from the newspaper in the dining room. “I said, ‘So what?’” she recalled.

After he returned three days in a row, she finally approached him.

“Sir, you really love my place,” she told him.

In 1997, an electrical fire forced the restaurant to close for eight months.

“In the restaurant industry, eight months is murder,” Paola said.

Mamma Maria’s reopened with a fundraiser for the Leukemia Society of America.

But one tradition did not return. The blaze was unrelated to the drinks, but Paola had lost her enthusiasm for open flames in the dining room, and the flaming sambuca was 86ed.

Two years later, Mamma Maria’s expanded to television. In 1999, the family bought a weekly half-hour slot on the Food Network for a self-produced program, Cooking With Mamma, Old World Secrets.

The show was taped in a studio kitchen above the dining room, with Rendell as Maria’s first guest. Maria used her maiden name, Di Marco, because the family thought it would be easier for viewers to pronounce.

Back at the restaurant, the fixed-price format endured. Claudio’s death in 2005 hit the family hard, as did the recession in 2008. In 2010, after 18 years of belt-stretching meals, Mamma Maria’s began allowing à la carte dining Monday through Thursday.

Then the pandemic arrived.

Mamma Maria’s closed in 2020, along with the family’s food-truck operation. By the time restrictions had eased enough for the family to consider reopening, Maria’s health had become the priority.

Paola faced a choice: return to the all-consuming work of running a restaurant or help care for her mother.

“Restaurants, we’ve had many in our lives,” she said. “Mother, you only have one.”

The family hosted private events in the meantime. Now 79 and feeling fine, Maria is preparing to sell the property and, with her family, take Mamma Maria’s into another form.

She has boxes of handwritten recipes, including dishes passed through the family for generations. She is working on an Italian-language cookbook, while Paola and Lilla are helping to translate, organize, and photograph the recipes. They envision a series of cookbooks and possibly a line of pasta, sauces, and Maria’s homemade limoncello.

That last item would be a particularly natural extension of Mamma Maria’s, Perry said.

“When you went to Mamma Maria’s, you were drinking limoncello whether you intended to or not — and usually you wanted to.”

For Maria, selling the buildings means giving up the restaurant, not the work that grew out of it.

“Just because the restaurant is finished,” she said, “doesn’t mean I’m finished.”