Filippi’s Pizza Grotto

The DePhilippis family arrived in San Diego in 1947 and opened an Italian market, Cash and Carry, on India Street; the restaurant behind it followed in 1950 and is still run by descendants of the founders. Customers pass through the shop, past tinned tomatoes, salami and olive oil, into a dim back room hung with straw-covered chianti flasks, with red-checked cloths on the tables. The menu is Italian-American of the older sort: thick-crust pizza, lasagne, spaghetti and meatballs, in substantial portions. It is not the most refined cooking in Little Italy, a district that now holds a good deal of newer restaurants, but it predates the area's redevelopment by decades and remains the clearest surviving link to the fishing families who settled here.