Walk down Liberty Avenue toward the Bloomfield Bridge today and you will find Camino, a modern Mexican restaurant whose cocktail program the owners described to Patch as "a straight-up firework show" of drinks. It has been open since October 2025.
For more than 65 years, that building belonged to one restaurant: Del's Bar & Ristorante DelPizzo. According to the Tribune-Review, 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, told the Tribune-Review at the time:
"This city is growing young and trendy, and we're kind of old-fashioned."
The decade after Del's closed brought a series of attempts to find a new fit for the building.
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 before Camino opened.
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. The team is bringing a format it already operates elsewhere in the city to a building where two earlier restaurants had closed.
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:
| Address | Decades-long anchor | What tried to replace it | What's there now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foot of the Bloomfield Bridge | Del's Bar & Ristorante DelPizzo, Italian, 1949 to 2015 | Jabo's Smoque House (2016 to 2018), Sugar and Smoke (2018 to 2019), then five-plus years vacant | Camino, Mexican, open since October 2025 |
| 4786 Liberty Ave | Lombardozzi's, Italian, closed 2021 after 50 years | Vacant for a few years | Fet-Fisk, Nordic seafood, James Beard-nominated |
| 4744 Liberty Ave | D'Amico's, Italian, later became Station | Nothingman, which had only opened in 2024 | Giulia, coastal Italian, expected this fall |
That third address is the one that changes the story.
The Irony Arriving This Fall
4744 Liberty Ave has already cycled through several names: 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. Giulia will take a different approach from 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.
Little Italy Days and Bloomfield's Dining Scene
Little Italy Days, the four-day street festival that shuts down Liberty Avenue every August, ran from August 13 through 16 in 2026.
A CBS Pittsburgh report quotes festival producer Sal Richetti, who has produced the event for over two decades: "We get a good over 100,000 people that attend the festival."
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 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. Festival food includes offerings from caterers and Strip District restaurants, while Liberty Avenue restaurants serve a range of cuisines throughout the year.
Bloomfield's year-round dining scene includes Apteka, an all-vegan Eastern European kitchen marking ten years on Liberty Avenue this year; Fet-Fisk's Nordic plates; and Camino's Ensenada-style fish tacos. Giulia, expected to open this fall, will add a coastal Italian menu. The Bloomfield Saturday Market at 5050 Liberty Ave is open through November 21 this year and sells produce and prepared food.
Little Italy Days and the neighborhood's restaurant history remain part of Bloomfield's identity. The former Italian restaurants now house businesses with varied menus, while Giulia's planned coastal Italian menu will take a different approach from Del's.
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.
