It Took Ten Years And Three Restaurants To Replace Del's In Bloomfield

Walk down Liberty Avenue toward the Bloomfield Bridge today and you will find Camino, a modern Mexican restaurant whose cocktail program the owners describe as "a straight-up firework show" of drinks. It has been open since October 2025, and by Bloomfield standards, that alone counts as an accomplishment.

For more than 65 years, that building belonged to one restaurant: Del's Bar & Ristorante DelPizzo. The DelPizzo family traced its roots there back to a small grocery in Larimer, converted first into the Meadow Grill and then, in 1949, into Del's when the family moved the business to Bloomfield. Graduations happened there. So did the meals people ate right after a funeral. It was Italian food the way a generation of Bloomfield residents defined Italian food, and it closed for good on May 2, 2015.

Marianne DelPizzo, who co-owned the restaurant with her brother and mother, put the closure plainly at the time.

"This city is growing young and trendy, and we're kind of old-fashioned."

She was more right than she probably wanted to be. What happened to that building over the following decade says something about Bloomfield that no one who only visits for Little Italy Days would guess: the neighborhood everyone still calls Little Italy has spent ten years proving it can no longer support the kind of restaurant that made it Little Italy in the first place.

Ten Years, Three Restaurants, One Building

Del's closing left a 4,000-square-foot building at the foot of the Bloomfield Bridge, and Bloomfield tried twice to fill it with something adjacent to what it lost. Jabo's Smoque House, a barbecue joint, opened next and lasted about two years before closing in the spring of 2018. Its successor, Sugar and Smoke, made it about a year before closing in 2019. Neither was Italian. Neither made it past year two. After Sugar and Smoke closed, the building sat empty for more than five years, the longest vacancy any tenant in that spot had managed, whether they were serving lasagna or brisket.

Camino finally broke the streak, and it is worth noticing who is behind it: the same team already running Totopo Mexican Kitchen and Bar in Mt. Lebanon and Tocayo Taqueria & Tequila in Shadyside. This was not a first-time operator testing a concept on a legendary corner. It was a proven kitchen extending a format that already worked elsewhere in the city, dropped into a building that had rejected two previous attempts to reinvent it from scratch.

A Few Blocks Away, The Same Reset Moved Faster

A short walk up Liberty Avenue, the same pattern played out with less drama. Lombardozzi's, an Italian restaurant that had operated for 50 years, closed in 2021. Its building at 4786 Liberty Ave became Fet-Fisk, a Nordic seafood restaurant and oyster bar that has since picked up two James Beard nominations and landed on best-of lists from national food publications. The kitchen kept much of Lombardozzi's original glassware and furnishings, a small gesture toward the building's history inside a menu that has nothing to do with red sauce or veal parmesan.

What made Fet-Fisk's transition faster than Camino's is not luck. Before it ever signed a lease on Liberty Avenue, Fet-Fisk had already run as a pop-up for five years, building a following before it needed a permanent address. Camino's predecessors in the Del's building had no such runway. They opened cold, into a space still associated with a restaurant most of Bloomfield had eaten at for a family occasion at some point in their lives, and both folded within two years.

Put the two buildings side by side and the pattern gets clearer:

That third address is the one that changes the story.

The Irony Arriving This Fall

4744 Liberty Ave has already cycled through more names than the other two buildings combined: D'Amico's, then Station, then Nothingman, which had only opened in 2024 before it, too, made way for what comes next. What's replacing it is Giulia, a coastal Italian restaurant from Jamilka Borges and Dianne DeStefano, the chefs behind Lilith in Shadyside. Renovations have been underway through the summer, with a fall opening expected at that address.

DeStefano has Sicilian family roots and grew up spending time in Bloomfield, and she has said plainly that she wanted to bring Italian food back to the neighborhood. But Giulia is not trying to be Del's. The menu is built around seafood and coastal Sicilian cooking, made with pasta extruded in house, and it skips the tomato-heavy red sauce that defined Bloomfield Italian dining for generations. DeStefano told a Pittsburgh food writer this year that it was important to her to bring Italian cuisine back to Bloomfield, but what she is building is closer to Lilith's seasonal, ingredient-driven style scaled up than it is to anything on Del's old lunch buffet.

So the neighborhood is getting its Italian restaurant back, on an address that used to be Italian before it wasn't, replacing a concept that also wasn't Italian. It is the closest thing Bloomfield has had to a return in a decade, and even it arrives reinvented.

The Neighborhood That Still Throws The Party

None of this means Bloomfield stopped being Italian in any way that matters to the people who live there. Little Italy Days, the four-day street festival that shuts down Liberty Avenue every August, just wrapped its 2026 run from August 13 through 16, and by the festival producer's own count, it still pulls a crowd that dwarfs anything a single restaurant could manage.

"We get a good over 100,000 people that attend the festival," said Sal Richetti, who has produced the event for over two decades.

But look at who is actually cooking. Michael Vitanovich, owner of Tambellini Event Catering, marked his 24th year supplying the festival with sausage, pasta, and meatballs by the hundreds of pounds. Dave Anoia, whose restaurant DiAnoia's Eatery is actually in the Strip District rather than Bloomfield, reported serving about 2,400 meatballs and 30 trays of lasagna over the festival's three and a half days. The Italian food that draws six-figure crowds to Bloomfield each August is largely imported for the weekend by caterers and Strip District kitchens, not served daily by restaurants on Liberty Avenue itself.

That is the part worth sitting with if you actually live here. The festival is real, the crowds are real, and the Italian heritage behind it is not manufactured. But day to day, Bloomfield's food identity is Apteka, an all-vegan Eastern European kitchen marking ten years on Liberty Avenue this year, or Fet-Fisk's Nordic plates, or Camino's Ensenada-style fish tacos, or soon, a coastal Italian menu that specifically avoids the thing Italian food in Bloomfield used to mean. The neighborhood's Saturday morning rhythm still runs through the Bloomfield Saturday Market at 5050 Liberty Ave, open through November 21 this year, selling produce and prepared food from vendors who have nothing to do with any of the above.

Little Italy survives here as a name, a street closure in August, and a catering order from a restaurant two neighborhoods over. The buildings that used to define it now hold some of the least Italian food in the city, and the one restaurant trying to put Italian cooking back on Liberty Avenue is doing it without the red sauce that made the old version recognizable in the first place.

If you're watching Bloomfield because you're thinking about buying or selling here, that kind of turnover on a commercial strip is usually a leading indicator worth understanding alongside the comps, not instead of them. Rachel Mazzie works with buyers and sellers across Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, including the East End, and can walk you through what a changing local scene like this one tends to mean for the surrounding housing market. Reach out to schedule a free consultation.