Walk east out of Wawaset Park on almost any block and you hit Union Street before you've worked up a sweat. That's the boundary line for Wilmington's Little Italy, and it has been for as long as anyone's kept records on it. What hasn't stayed the same is what's actually cooking behind those storefronts. The buildings are old. The kitchens inside them turn over more often than most people realize.
That's the thing worth knowing if you live here and default to the same two or three places out of habit. The strip your neighborhood backs into isn't a preserved Italian restaurant row frozen since the 1940s, even though it gets described that way constantly. It's a street where the address survives and the business inside it doesn't, generation after generation, cuisine after cuisine. Understanding which spots are the real survivors, and which ones just look old because they're built into old brick, changes how you read the whole strip.
The Street That Refused To Stay One Cuisine
Through the 1990s, Union Street ran on what Eclipse Bistro owner Carl Georigi has called "red gravy and sauce." That started shifting in the late 1980s. Bangkok House opened at 104 N. Union St. in 1988, the first real break from the Italian-only pattern. Walter's Steakhouse and El Toro followed in the early 1990s, and Eclipse Bistro opened in 1996 at Pennsylvania Avenue and Union, later becoming an anchor of what grew into the Platinum Dining Group, a hospitality company built around it that also runs a retail market and a catering business.
By the time you get to today, the strip along Union and Lincoln Streets runs on Thai curry, Mexican tacos, and a cheese counter that stocks South American requesón alongside its original Italian mozzarella and scamorza. That cheese counter, M. Fierro & Sons at 1025 N. Union St., has been part of the neighborhood since 1928, when Michael Fierro started making cheese in the basement of a grocery store on Sixth Street. The business moved. The cheese recipes mostly didn't. That's the pattern that repeats up and down this strip: continuity of place, constant turnover of what's actually for sale.
The Address Outlives The Restaurant
The clearest way to see this is to trace a few specific spots.
| Location | What's There Now | What Was There Before |
|---|---|---|
| Corner of Lincoln Street and Shallcross Avenue, Forty Acres | Scalessa's Old School Italian Kitchen, run by Donnie Scalessa | George Constantinou's sub shop, opened in 1941 |
| 1900 Lancaster Ave. | Ristorante Attilio, since 1985 | Marconi's, opened after World War II by Massimo Marconi to feed GIs craving Italian food |
| The building now home to Park Café | Park Café, since January 2021 | Movable Feast, which ran from 1997 until 2018 |
None of these are franchise flips or corporate rebrands. Each one is a small business that closed, sat empty or changed hands, and reopened as something with a different name and a different menu but the same four walls. Park Café's building has actually cycled through three identities. It was the headquarters of Blackwell & Sons, a painting company founded in 1908, before it became Movable Feast in 1997, and the café's current owners, Chris Blackwell of Jamestown Painting and hospitality veteran Paul Bouchard, named the new business for well-heeled Wawaset Park on purpose. Three different businesses, one address, over more than a century.
Bangkok House followed a version of the same pattern without changing storefronts. It stayed a Thai restaurant, but the original owners eventually sold it to Mukun Cronin, who'd started there as a server and family friend before taking over the business.
What's Actually Old, And What Just Looks It
Not everything on the strip is a turnover story. A handful of businesses really have run continuously since the mid-20th century, and they're worth knowing apart from the newer arrivals precisely because they're rarer than the strip's overall vibe suggests.
Mrs. Robino's traces back to 1940, when Tresilla Robino opened an Italian restaurant in her own basement before moving the operation to Union Street. It's now run by her great-granddaughter, Andrea Minuti Wakefield, and the menu still includes dishes named for family members, like chicken Josephine, a tribute to Robino's daughter. M. Fierro & Sons, as noted, goes back to 1928. Those two are the actual anchors. Everything else on the strip, including places that feel permanent because they've been there your whole time in the neighborhood, is closer to 20 or 30 years old.
Sweet Somethings Desserts is a good example of how recently some of this "old" character was built. Owner Lee Slaninko came to Union Street from Kennett Square looking for space to expand his dessert business, and found it more affordable to open there than almost anywhere else nearby.
"Union Street has become a destination, and not just a pass-through to Kirkwood Highway."
That's Slaninko's read on what changed. He's watched newer additions like 8th & Union and V-Trap Kitchen & Lounge open alongside the older names, and Milk & Honey Cafe and Gallery, a coffee shop and art gallery at 807 N. Union St. run by Quincy Watkins, added another layer entirely when it opened, doubling as a stop on the city's monthly Art Loop and sourcing its coffee from Brandywine Coffee Roasters.
What's Still Drawing People In Right Now
As of this August, a current ranking of restaurants near 1006 N. Union St. still puts Eclipse Bistro and Scalessa's at the top of the list, which tells you the two ends of the timeline, a 1996 anchor and a more recent arrival built on a 1941 address, are both still pulling their weight. That's the useful takeaway if you're deciding where to walk tonight rather than relitigating the whole strip's history: the newest name on the block isn't automatically the best bet, and the oldest name isn't either. Both extremes are represented in what's actually busy right now.
The One Week That Still Belongs To The Old Pattern
For all the turnover in what's cooking, the calendar around here hasn't changed nearly as much. St. Anthony's Italian Festival runs June 7 through June 13 in 2026 at St. Anthony of Padua Church on North Dupont Street, and it remains one of the largest Italian-American cultural events in the country, staged as the primary fundraiser for the parish's grade school. New this year, the parish moved its Feast Day Mass and Procession of Saints to the festival's opening Sunday, combining two traditions that used to happen separately. If you're new to the block, that week is worth building into next summer's calendar even though it's already behind us for this year. It's the one point in the annual rhythm where the neighborhood's Italian roots and its newer multicultural mix show up on the same streets at the same time, whether you're there for the cannoli or the Opera Delaware pop-up performances that have become part of the week's entertainment lineup.
What This Means If You're Already Here
The practical version of all this: don't treat any single restaurant on Union Street as a permanent fixture, and don't assume something feels old just because the building does. A few things worth keeping in mind next time you're deciding where to eat:
- The strip's true survivors are M. Fierro & Sons (1928) and Mrs. Robino's (1940). Everything else has turned over at least once in the last three or four decades.
- Addresses matter more than names. If a favorite spot ever closes, the location itself has a strong track record of reopening as something new within a reasonable stretch of time.
- The August 2026 rankings still favor a mix of the oldest and newest names, so there's no need to chase trends over the strip's established anchors, or vice versa.
You picked a neighborhood two blocks from a strip that reinvents its restaurant lineup roughly once a decade while somehow never losing its identity as a food destination. That's a genuinely unusual thing for a residential street to pull off, and it's easy to take for granted once you've lived here a while.
If you're weighing what your Wawaset Park home is worth in a market shaped by this kind of neighborhood, or thinking about what else is out there while you've got Union Street at your back door, Harrison Properties Ltd puts together a free home valuation so you know exactly where you stand before you decide anything.
