Samuels Seafood has been involved in the seafood industry for over 100 years – and it’s all thanks to love.
In 1919, shoemaker Giuseppe Ippolito traveled to the U.S. and fell in love with the daughter of Gaetano Darigo. Darigo was a fisherman in Sicily and traveled to the U.S. to continue his trade and sell fish. He gave Ippolito an ultimatum: To marry his daughter, he’d have to get into the fish business.
Over 100 years later, that original foray into the fish business has now become Samuels Seafood, Anthony D’Angelo, who currently works in product development for the company, told SeafoodSource.
Ippolito followed through on Darigo’s request and started selling fish in the streets of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., using a pushcart. Business continued to grow until he upsized to a horse and wagon and eventually to a brick-and-mortar location in the early 1940s that he named Ippolito’s.
“He got his son to go out with the horse and wagon, and then at the time, his son-in-law – my grandfather – would go out with another horse and wagon setup,” Anthony said.
Decades later, in the 1970s, D’Angelo’s great-grandfather Gaetano Darigo moved back to Sicily and was planning to close up the seafood shop. Samuel D’Angelo – Anthony’s father – had worked in the shop as a child with his own father, also named Samuel, and decided to keep the seafood business going.
“My father was at Temple University for about six or seven months and said, ‘I hate school. I’ll go take over the business,’” Anthony said. “He bought it for a very small amount of money and took over the store.”
Samuel later got married, had his son Anthony, and started to push the business into becoming more than just a seafood store.
The business had an advantage early on, once again thanks to a relationship.
Samuel was friends with a waiter at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, who happened to live near the store. At one point, the chef of the Four Seasons’ restaurant needed something on short notice, and they called up what was then still called Ippolito’s for help.
“My father got the stuff he needed and brought it up to the Four Seasons and started selling to restaurants,” Anthony said. “It just kind of took off. The service we have at the retail level, the chefs weren’t used to that. There were no real delivery services at that point; all the chefs would shop the market.”
When a stall opened up in that market, Samuel took a chance and decided to open his own spot.
“My father said, ‘Let me open up a stall, but I don’t want to ruin the family name Ippolito’s.’ At the time, that was a popular fish store in South Philadelphia, so he used his first name Sam to open up Samuels and Son,” Anthony said. “It was Samuels because it was my grandfather Sam, my father Sam, my brother Sam, and the son – me. That’s where the business started in 1989, and it’s been a wild ride ever since!”
Over three decades later, Samuels Seafood is ...
