Vetri's latest, Lo Spiedo is firing on all cylinders at the Navy Yard

"The food is not necessarily food from Italy, but it has the sensibility of Italy."

A Creekstone burger at Lo Spiedo
Neal Santos

The day I saw Vetri’s Jeff Benjamin at the Navy Yard was probably four years ago. We were both having lunch at Urban Outfitters’ jet hangar of a cafeteria, and from the view across my salad, the business end of the Vetri empire appeared to be in some sort of meeting. I doubted it was to purchase a decommissioned battleship.

A Vetri restaurant in the Navy Yard … 

At that point in time, you’ll remember, Amis had just opened. There was no Alla Spina, no Osteria at the Moorestown Mall. The thought of Marc Vetri and his team opening a new restaurant in the bucolic bowels of South Philly seemed groundbreaking — and suicidal.

Four years later, it still kind of does.

Lo Spiedo (‘the spit,’ for the restaurant’s rotisserie cooking) occupies the Yard’s former guardhouse, a handsome red-brick manor with stone porches, colonial-look lanterns and trees twinkling in Christmas lights. 

“Thanks for coming out on a Sunday,” our server said with sincerity. “Not many people do.”

The guy was honest, not sulky, about it, and I appreciated his candor when I pressed for a full report: strong hits on both Friday and Saturday nights, happy-hour rushes during the week, decent lunch traffic. Upstairs, in a dining room whose simple furniture, ample windows and wood-wainscoted cream walls evoke a schoolhouse from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, only a handful of tables were occupied. If getting people to eat at a place on North Broad Street was a challenge, Vetri and company have twice as big a task getting folks this far down South Broad.

But damned if they’re not going to put the best possible product out there. Under the direction of 29-year-old chef Scott Calhoun, Lo Spiedo has proved to be my favorite effort from the Vetri group — and the most impressive restaurant at such an early stage in its existence. Early on, Amis and Alla Spina were hit-and-miss. Osteria Moorestown was worse — it’s easily the second-best restaurant in South Jersey now — and the whole rotolo hype at Pizzeria Vetri is lost on me, thanks to a dry batch in the opening months. But Lo Spiedo … Though Lo Spiedo is not without flaws, this carnival of brisket drippings, mushroom martinis and cast-iron apple pies already has the magic.

That magic ignites with smart, delicious cocktails: a sprightly Campari-Prosecco slushy transported from a foreign riviera; a Bloody Mary with a backbone of smoky charred tomatoes; a voluptuous 48-hour milk punch steeped in wintry cotechino-sausage-type spices; the smart, savory Porcini Martinez, starring Bluecoat Barrel Reserve gin, mushroom tincture and a sesame oil anointing that makes love to your nose. Behind the bar, fronted by an intricate tile floor resembling a Missoni pattern, head bartender Stephen Warner, beverage director Steve Wildy and their team are making their own cardamom tonic for G&Ts, blending tangy apple shrub for rum-and-Aperol Flat Tires and barrel-aging a flagship amaro involving sarsaparilla, eucalyptus and pear-cello. Their prep list must rival those of the morning cooks.

A single rock clanked around in my glass as I sipped the silky milk punch, tinted a pale jade from green tea, and thought of that time I had first spied Jeff Benjamin at the Navy Yard. 

“That was back when some other developers were showing [spaces] to us, but the whole deal then was just not right,” Marc Vetri explains. But it introduced the company to the Yard’s pastoral majesty and eventually, they relocated their offices to the campus and struck a deal to open a restaurant in the old guardhouse.

“At Osteria, we obviously work with a lot of wood, and we really wanted to do something like that, but sort of on steroids,” Vetri says. They spun Spiedo off a rotisserie trend percolating in Italy and commissioned their oven consigliere, Renato Riccio of Renato Ovens in Texas, to build a wood-burner with eight claw-footed spits and expandable custom cages that hold everything from octopus to wings to giant heads of cabbage. 

As at places like a.kitchen and Petruce, nearly everything touches the fire at some point, but ironically, Spiedo’s spit-roasted mains proved to be the least flavorful items on the menu. Pork shoulder was hacked-up and dry. Girthy octopus tentacles were mealy and bland. The pillow of smoked brisket was so tender my fork sunk in as if the beef was a cake, but it needed salt.

I would rather get my brisket in burger form. Seated on a seeded Martin’s roll, the plump, perfectly cooked Creekstone-beef patty gushed umami beneath slices of tomato and cool iceberg lettuce. American cheese, peerless Benton’s bacon and grilled onions are extras that should be mandatory. Stacked together, the elements created the best burger experience I’ve had in this town since Garces’ Village Burger dropped my pants in 2009. (The wussy shoestring fries are kind of trifling, though.) A fantastic burger. By Marc Vetri. Who knew?

At Lo Spiedo, I learned our resident king of Italian cuisine has all sorts of other hidden talents: gooey Asiago-and-cheddar mac and cheese given the love of a Vetri pasta course; velvet creamed kale that put every steakhouse spinach to shame; roasted carrots glazed in barbecue sauce and served with a housemade version of Hidden Valley ranch — the night’s sleeper hit. Says Vetri: “The food is not necessarily food from Italy, but it has the sensibility of Italy.”

Scott Calhoun is a stud that deserves as much of the credit as his mentor. I couldn’t quit the Lancaster native’s smoky spit-roasted cabbage in a crock of Gorgonzola fonduta, or the sponge of cornbread soaked in rotisserie drippings. Al dente rigatoni tossed with spit-roasted tomato sauce and ricotta salata had such depth of flavor, I barely believed him when he told me it was vegetarian. 

To snack on, the restaurant offered crispy chicken wings, puffs of fried mozzarella scented with rosemary, a pair of elegant, unexpected salads (shaved raw pumpkin, spicy escarole) and a smattering of little spiedini like agrodolce chicken thighs, head-on shrimp and the most beautiful cubes of tuna — all infinitely better than the larger spit-roasted meats.

Calhoun shares credit for the excellent desserts: Vetri Foundation chef Tia McDonald collaborated on the Nutella whoopie-pies-like “Devil Dogs.” Brad Spence — Calhoun calls him the “semifreddo king” — taught him his method, producing a milk chocolate semi for a sundae crusted in meringue kisses, as well as a cinnamon version that crowns Wildy and Wagner’s house ginger beer in an effervescent float.

Baked in a square cast-iron skillet, the unbelievable buttermilk apple pie gets its puff-pastry quality from adding vodka in the dough, a trick from Osteria’s Danielle Seipp. That crust, with its multitude of layers and bronzed bits clinging to the corners of the smoking-hot pan, gives this pie no equal.

There’s a ton of great food at Lo Spiedo, yet the burger and that apple pie are what I cannot stop thinking about it. So quintessentially American, so out of Vetri’s wheelhouse. I would go to New York for them. The Navy Yard, by comparison, seems not very far. 

LO SPIEDO | 4503 S. Broad St., 215-282-3184, lo-spiedo.com. Mon.-Thu., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sat., 5-10 p.m.; Sun. 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Small plates and pasta, $4-$16; grilled meats, $18-$120; desserts, $8-$12.