Super Bowl Sunday is so close to being a national holiday that I actually wondered for a minute if the supermarkets would be open.
But if not an actual holiday, at the every least, it’s a national festival, with its own special foods, traditions with family and friends, and shopping opportunities to buy big-screen TVs for “the big game.”
There are no people better at celebrating special feast days than Italians, so no place better to spend Super Bowl Sunday than South Philly.
And a festive day it was, the Eagles’ absence notwithstanding, as the streets were filled with people stocking up on their favorite game-appropriate food and beverage items for the long night of viewing ahead. We went to lunch at a barbecue joint, and ten minutes after they opened at noon, almost everything was sold out with pre-orders for the big game.
We stopped at an old-school pizza shop to pick up tomato pie, a local delicacy, 
and learned that there was a two-hour wait for a pizza, six hours before kickoff. (Note their sign’s defiant insistence on using the Philadelphia idiom “gravy” for red sauce.)
Worth the wait? I’d say so.
Thanks to Randye Green for her photos.
Gigi's Italia 